The actor told Howard Stern this week that Trump is "exactly" what Americans deserve .

Perpetually perturbed actor-producer Alec Baldwin sat down with Howard Stern Tuesday to formally announce his endorsement of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. Or, rather, to formally announce that the entire political system is broken.

Asked what his thoughts were on the business magnate and vibrant Twitter personality, Baldwin said that, if Trump snags the nomination — or worse, wins the entire presidency — it will be “exactly what we deserve right now with the system we have.”

The “system,” Baldwin went on to explain, is one that is entirely run on money. “All of them across the board are owned by somebody,” he said, pointing the finger back at Democrats. “You’ve got to raise sick amounts of money,” the multi-millionaire added.

“There’s a part of me that would love to see Trump win,” Baldwin said, clarifying that, as a “huge campaign finance reform person,” he knows stuff.

Baldwin will be appearing in “Mission Impossible Rogue Nation” — and likely a city street near you to yell at protesters to hurry up — later this month.

The actor told Howard Stern this week that Trump is "exactly" what Americans deserve .

Perpetually perturbed actor-producer Alec Baldwin sat down with Howard Stern Tuesday to formally announce his endorsement of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. Or, rather, to formally announce that the entire political system is broken.

Asked what his thoughts were on the business magnate and vibrant Twitter personality, Baldwin said that, if Trump snags the nomination — or worse, wins the entire presidency — it will be “exactly what we deserve right now with the system we have.”

The “system,” Baldwin went on to explain, is one that is entirely run on money. “All of them across the board are owned by somebody,” he said, pointing the finger back at Democrats. “You’ve got to raise sick amounts of money,” the multi-millionaire added.

“There’s a part of me that would love to see Trump win,” Baldwin said, clarifying that, as a “huge campaign finance reform person,” he knows stuff.

Baldwin will be appearing in “Mission Impossible Rogue Nation” — and likely a city street near you to yell at protesters to hurry up — later this month.

Well, the big day is upon us. Politico reported this week that a handful of candidates have made the final cut and have been invited to make one last tryout for the starring role in the Kochs’ big 2015 Summer Super-Pageant:

Four leading GOP presidential candidates – Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker – are traveling to a Southern California luxury hotel in coming days to make their cases directly to the Koch brothers and hundreds of other wealthy conservatives planning to spend close to $1 billion in the run-up to the 2016 election. The gathering – which also will include former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, but notably not Sen. Rand Paul — is hosted by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the umbrella group in the Kochs’ increasingly influential network of political and public policy outfits. It represents a major opportunity for the candidates at a pivotal moment in the presidential primary.

The crowded field of GOP contenders is competing aggressively for the support of uncommitted mega-donors as the campaign hurtles towards its first debates in what’s expected to be a long and costly battle for the Republican nomination. Freedom Partners’ annual summer conference is set for August 1 through August 3, and is expected to draw 450 of the biggest financiers of the right for sessions about the fiscally conservative policies and politics that animate the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch and many of the donors in their network.

Most have the capability to write seven- or even eight-figure checks to the super PACs fueling the GOP presidential primary, and a significant proportion have yet to settle on a 2016 choice, or are considering supporting multiple candidates. That includes Charles and David Koch, as well as Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer, both of whom will be represented at the conference by advisers, and a number of other attendees of past conferences whose 2016 leanings are being closely watched.

The article stresses that the Kochs are not going to officially anoint their choice but their big checks, and those of their billionaire buds, are being closely watched for signs of who the “smart money” is betting on to come out on top. The current frontrunner Donald Trump was not invited, and according to this article is being actively blocked by the Koch network. Obviously, they think the eventual winner will be one of those four candidates (plus Carly Fiorina, for some reason.) Think about that for a moment. There are some extremely rich Republicans out there who think that Ted Cruz has what it takes to be president.

That in mind, let’s take a look at Cruz’s latest, shall we? In a blatant attempt to make Trump and Huckabee look like loser moderates, the Texas bomb thrower said the following earlier this week about the Iran nuclear non-proliferation agreement:

“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism. Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”

If that isn’t an illustration of just how hard it is for this crop of GOP hopefuls to out-demagogue one another, I don’t know what is. Chamberlain to Hitler to radical Islamic extremist. There’s nothing left for Lindsey Graham to fulminate about except Satan.

One big money guy did call Cruz on the carpet for his hyperbole:

I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.

“Nowhere in President Obama’s remarks did he dispute the underlying facts. Nowhere in President Obama’s remarks did he point to any other organization on the face of the globe that would be a larger global financier of radical Islamic terrorism than the Obama administration is trying to become.”

The president didn’t reveal any larger global financiers of radical islamic terrorism besides himself, which proves that he is it! Point, set, match.

But the show must go on, and what kind of Big Top circus would it be without a first class ringmaster? With all the major conservative stars from every medium to choose from — from Megyn Kelly to Sean Hannity to Rich Lowry to Eric Erickson — it appears that the Kochs have gone in a different direction for their weekend soiree:

Politico’s chief White House correspondent Mike Allen has been booked to emcee part of an event set up by a group funded by the Koch brothers designed to connect Republican presidential candidates with wealthy donors, according to Politico.

Keep in mind that this is not a presidential debate for the public. It isn’t an issues forum or a town hall for voters and constituents. This is a meeting for big Republican donors to decide which candidate to give gigantic, unlimited campaign contributions thus putting their thumbs on the scale of democracy. And a highly respected establishment journalist is helping them do it. This isn’t even the first time this year that a mainstream journalist has performed this little function for the Kochs. Last January, ABCs Jonathan Karl moderated a similar q-and-a for the benefit of the GOP megabucks network. As Think Progress noted, this raises some serious ethical questions. Marc Cooper of the University of Southern California’s School for Communication and Journalism, told them:

Karl’s involvement amounts to “an in-kind contribution to a partisan group that is clearly aimed at positioning for the 2016 race,” noting, “The public has no input or access and no public service is being performed. Karl has no business being there.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states that journalists should “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,” and “avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.” The fact that Allen states he has “editorial control of the questions” actually makes it worse — he’s lending his own credibility and expertise to the task at hand: helping the billionaires pick their boy.

Needless to say, nobody in the establishment media cares about this. They see nothing wrong with journalists privately helping the Kochs try to buy the election. They like to think they’re all of the same class and share their interests. And frankly they do:

Attendees at Mitt Romney’s third annual retreat this weekend will have the chance to go skeet shooting with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham or play flag football with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. They can even do “Sunrise Pilates” with Bloomberg reporter Mark Halperin and the former first lady aspirant Ann Romney.

[T]he New York Post’s Kyle Smith calls Stewart a “partisan hack” who “allowed himself to be seduced by power. He sold out. He dined with those he should have been dining upon.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Stewart’s audience was never under any illusion that Stewart was politically neutral. If these conservatives thought he was they missed the joke for 16 years. But that description very aptly describes someone else. And he’ll be dining with a whole bunch of Republican billionaires and candidates this very week-end.

Well, the big day is upon us. Politico reported this week that a handful of candidates have made the final cut and have been invited to make one last tryout for the starring role in the Kochs’ big 2015 Summer Super-Pageant:

Four leading GOP presidential candidates – Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker – are traveling to a Southern California luxury hotel in coming days to make their cases directly to the Koch brothers and hundreds of other wealthy conservatives planning to spend close to $1 billion in the run-up to the 2016 election. The gathering – which also will include former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, but notably not Sen. Rand Paul — is hosted by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the umbrella group in the Kochs’ increasingly influential network of political and public policy outfits. It represents a major opportunity for the candidates at a pivotal moment in the presidential primary.

The crowded field of GOP contenders is competing aggressively for the support of uncommitted mega-donors as the campaign hurtles towards its first debates in what’s expected to be a long and costly battle for the Republican nomination. Freedom Partners’ annual summer conference is set for August 1 through August 3, and is expected to draw 450 of the biggest financiers of the right for sessions about the fiscally conservative policies and politics that animate the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch and many of the donors in their network.

Most have the capability to write seven- or even eight-figure checks to the super PACs fueling the GOP presidential primary, and a significant proportion have yet to settle on a 2016 choice, or are considering supporting multiple candidates. That includes Charles and David Koch, as well as Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer, both of whom will be represented at the conference by advisers, and a number of other attendees of past conferences whose 2016 leanings are being closely watched.

The article stresses that the Kochs are not going to officially anoint their choice but their big checks, and those of their billionaire buds, are being closely watched for signs of who the “smart money” is betting on to come out on top. The current frontrunner Donald Trump was not invited, and according to this article is being actively blocked by the Koch network. Obviously, they think the eventual winner will be one of those four candidates (plus Carly Fiorina, for some reason.) Think about that for a moment. There are some extremely rich Republicans out there who think that Ted Cruz has what it takes to be president.

That in mind, let’s take a look at Cruz’s latest, shall we? In a blatant attempt to make Trump and Huckabee look like loser moderates, the Texas bomb thrower said the following earlier this week about the Iran nuclear non-proliferation agreement:

“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism. Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”

If that isn’t an illustration of just how hard it is for this crop of GOP hopefuls to out-demagogue one another, I don’t know what is. Chamberlain to Hitler to radical Islamic extremist. There’s nothing left for Lindsey Graham to fulminate about except Satan.

One big money guy did call Cruz on the carpet for his hyperbole:

I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.

“Nowhere in President Obama’s remarks did he dispute the underlying facts. Nowhere in President Obama’s remarks did he point to any other organization on the face of the globe that would be a larger global financier of radical Islamic terrorism than the Obama administration is trying to become.”

The president didn’t reveal any larger global financiers of radical islamic terrorism besides himself, which proves that he is it! Point, set, match.

But the show must go on, and what kind of Big Top circus would it be without a first class ringmaster? With all the major conservative stars from every medium to choose from — from Megyn Kelly to Sean Hannity to Rich Lowry to Eric Erickson — it appears that the Kochs have gone in a different direction for their weekend soiree:

Politico’s chief White House correspondent Mike Allen has been booked to emcee part of an event set up by a group funded by the Koch brothers designed to connect Republican presidential candidates with wealthy donors, according to Politico.

Keep in mind that this is not a presidential debate for the public. It isn’t an issues forum or a town hall for voters and constituents. This is a meeting for big Republican donors to decide which candidate to give gigantic, unlimited campaign contributions thus putting their thumbs on the scale of democracy. And a highly respected establishment journalist is helping them do it. This isn’t even the first time this year that a mainstream journalist has performed this little function for the Kochs. Last January, ABCs Jonathan Karl moderated a similar q-and-a for the benefit of the GOP megabucks network. As Think Progress noted, this raises some serious ethical questions. Marc Cooper of the University of Southern California’s School for Communication and Journalism, told them:

Karl’s involvement amounts to “an in-kind contribution to a partisan group that is clearly aimed at positioning for the 2016 race,” noting, “The public has no input or access and no public service is being performed. Karl has no business being there.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states that journalists should “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,” and “avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.” The fact that Allen states he has “editorial control of the questions” actually makes it worse — he’s lending his own credibility and expertise to the task at hand: helping the billionaires pick their boy.

Needless to say, nobody in the establishment media cares about this. They see nothing wrong with journalists privately helping the Kochs try to buy the election. They like to think they’re all of the same class and share their interests. And frankly they do:

Attendees at Mitt Romney’s third annual retreat this weekend will have the chance to go skeet shooting with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham or play flag football with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. They can even do “Sunrise Pilates” with Bloomberg reporter Mark Halperin and the former first lady aspirant Ann Romney.

[T]he New York Post’s Kyle Smith calls Stewart a “partisan hack” who “allowed himself to be seduced by power. He sold out. He dined with those he should have been dining upon.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Stewart’s audience was never under any illusion that Stewart was politically neutral. If these conservatives thought he was they missed the joke for 16 years. But that description very aptly describes someone else. And he’ll be dining with a whole bunch of Republican billionaires and candidates this very week-end.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-latest-smear-campaign-against-bernie-sanders-collapsed-it-startedHow the Latest Smear Campaign Against Bernie Sanders Collapsed Before It Startedhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/104328550/0/alternet_election2012~How-the-Latest-Smear-Campaign-Against-Bernie-Sanders-Collapsed-Before-It-Started

The Vermont senator’s words were completely twisted. Here’s what he actually said.

This week, Bernie Sanders sat down with Vox.com for a lengthy interview on a variety of topics. One of the topics covered was the Vermont independent senator's views on immigration. Sanders' response to a question from Vox's Ezra Klein about whether the United States should have completely “open borders” has caused quite a bit of controversy. Here's the section in question:

KLEIN: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ....

SANDERS: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

KLEIN: Really?

SANDERS: Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

KLEIN: But it would make ....

SANDERS: Excuse me ....

KLEIN: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

SANDERS: It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

The first blogger to pick up on this section and use it to bash Sanders was Vox's on Dylan Matthews, a young writer with a history of engaging in poorly researched conjecture. He wrote a post attacking Sanders, tweeting it out under the curious line that the senator “doesn't actually care about inequality” even though Sanders has spent much of his life fighting inequality in every dimension.

But the actual post is even stranger.

Matthews calls Sanders' view “ugly” because it treats American “lives as more valuable than the lives of foreigners,” and says he's “wrong about what the effects of an open-border policy would be on American workers.” Matthews cites a “Libertarian” website that claims the world GDP would increase between 50 to 150 percent and then a bunch of other random statistics to try to make the case that completely unlimited immigration would be positive for the United States.

At one point, he even throws in the example of Russian migration to Israel giving Israelis as a whole a higher standard of living. (He ignores that the influx caused such large social problems in Israel that the country sought billions in loans to assist it and caused a housing crisis that exacerbated the growth of settlements in Palestinian territory.)

The underyling point made by Klein and Matthews is also very strange: that the solution to global inequalities is for the United States and other rich countries to simply eliminate their borders and let everyone in. This ignores the problems that actually create global economic inequality: dysfunctional governing systems, exploitative supply chains and poor distribution of capital.

People don't come to the United States because as soon as they land on its shores, they are granted riches. Historically, they come here for access to jobs. When the jobs don't exist, they don't come here. During the Great Recession, both documented and undocumented immigration fell sharply. One of the practical results of the North American Free Trade Agreement was the collapse of the Mexican agricultural industry, which was flooded with highly subsidized agribusiness from the United States. What actually happened was that migration to the United States from Mexico dramatically increased, as workers tried to find new jobs to the north.

By Matthews' logic, it was good that NAFTA wiped out a section of the Mexican middle class, so they could risk their lives crossing a desert to come to the United States to be exploited for substandard-wage jobs rather than achieve the middle-class lifestyles they had in their own communities.

A number of other outlets joined in the pile-on after Matthews' missive, including ThinkProgress. But what was most interesting was the confirmation of Sanders' thesis that the idea of open borders is an ultra-right-wing Koch brothers idea. After he made his remarks, a number of right-libertarians wrote pieces slamming Sanders, including Daniel Bier of the so-called Foundation for Economic Education.

What's being lost in all of the sniping at Sanders is his actual record on immigration. Sanders is a son of a Polish Jewish migrant, and has spoken in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and ending detention quotas for undocumented immigrants. He vocally supported President Obama's immigration executive order and has called for going even further, such as including the parents of dreamers, putting him to the left of President Obama. Sanders voted in favor of 2013's comprehensive immigration reform bill, the primary piece of legislation immigrant advocates support. In 2003, he had a zero percent rating from the main anti-immigrant advocacy group, FAIR.

Despite all of this, it appears Sanders is being slammed for admitting a core truth about immigration in America: today, the corporate elite are advocates for more immigration not because they care about the hard-working families who risk everything to come here but because they absolutely do want workers to exploit for lower wages. The challenge for progressives is to be able to conduct a fair and humane immigration policy that defends human rights while not simply doing the bidding of Corporate America.

"I don’t think there’s any presidential candidate, none, who thinks we should open up the borders,” explained Sanders at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce later this week.

That's a level of nuance that may be lost on bloggers who were quick to criticize Sanders, but it's one that working people in America and abroad understand. For Vox, however, nuance may not be the most profitable. Moiz Syed, who works at Wikimedia, pointed out on Twitter that Matthews' hit piece on Sanders popped up alongside a sponsorship from Walmart.

The Vermont senator’s words were completely twisted. Here’s what he actually said.

This week, Bernie Sanders sat down with Vox.com for a lengthy interview on a variety of topics. One of the topics covered was the Vermont independent senator's views on immigration. Sanders' response to a question from Vox's Ezra Klein about whether the United States should have completely “open borders” has caused quite a bit of controversy. Here's the section in question:

KLEIN: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ....

SANDERS: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

KLEIN: Really?

SANDERS: Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

KLEIN: But it would make ....

SANDERS: Excuse me ....

KLEIN: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

SANDERS: It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

The first blogger to pick up on this section and use it to bash Sanders was Vox's on Dylan Matthews, a young writer with a history of engaging in poorly researched conjecture. He wrote a post attacking Sanders, tweeting it out under the curious line that the senator “doesn't actually care about inequality” even though Sanders has spent much of his life fighting inequality in every dimension.

But the actual post is even stranger.

Matthews calls Sanders' view “ugly” because it treats American “lives as more valuable than the lives of foreigners,” and says he's “wrong about what the effects of an open-border policy would be on American workers.” Matthews cites a “Libertarian” website that claims the world GDP would increase between 50 to 150 percent and then a bunch of other random statistics to try to make the case that completely unlimited immigration would be positive for the United States.

At one point, he even throws in the example of Russian migration to Israel giving Israelis as a whole a higher standard of living. (He ignores that the influx caused such large social problems in Israel that the country sought billions in loans to assist it and caused a housing crisis that exacerbated the growth of settlements in Palestinian territory.)

The underyling point made by Klein and Matthews is also very strange: that the solution to global inequalities is for the United States and other rich countries to simply eliminate their borders and let everyone in. This ignores the problems that actually create global economic inequality: dysfunctional governing systems, exploitative supply chains and poor distribution of capital.

People don't come to the United States because as soon as they land on its shores, they are granted riches. Historically, they come here for access to jobs. When the jobs don't exist, they don't come here. During the Great Recession, both documented and undocumented immigration fell sharply. One of the practical results of the North American Free Trade Agreement was the collapse of the Mexican agricultural industry, which was flooded with highly subsidized agribusiness from the United States. What actually happened was that migration to the United States from Mexico dramatically increased, as workers tried to find new jobs to the north.

By Matthews' logic, it was good that NAFTA wiped out a section of the Mexican middle class, so they could risk their lives crossing a desert to come to the United States to be exploited for substandard-wage jobs rather than achieve the middle-class lifestyles they had in their own communities.

A number of other outlets joined in the pile-on after Matthews' missive, including ThinkProgress. But what was most interesting was the confirmation of Sanders' thesis that the idea of open borders is an ultra-right-wing Koch brothers idea. After he made his remarks, a number of right-libertarians wrote pieces slamming Sanders, including Daniel Bier of the so-called Foundation for Economic Education.

What's being lost in all of the sniping at Sanders is his actual record on immigration. Sanders is a son of a Polish Jewish migrant, and has spoken in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and ending detention quotas for undocumented immigrants. He vocally supported President Obama's immigration executive order and has called for going even further, such as including the parents of dreamers, putting him to the left of President Obama. Sanders voted in favor of 2013's comprehensive immigration reform bill, the primary piece of legislation immigrant advocates support. In 2003, he had a zero percent rating from the main anti-immigrant advocacy group, FAIR.

Despite all of this, it appears Sanders is being slammed for admitting a core truth about immigration in America: today, the corporate elite are advocates for more immigration not because they care about the hard-working families who risk everything to come here but because they absolutely do want workers to exploit for lower wages. The challenge for progressives is to be able to conduct a fair and humane immigration policy that defends human rights while not simply doing the bidding of Corporate America.

"I don’t think there’s any presidential candidate, none, who thinks we should open up the borders,” explained Sanders at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce later this week.

That's a level of nuance that may be lost on bloggers who were quick to criticize Sanders, but it's one that working people in America and abroad understand. For Vox, however, nuance may not be the most profitable. Moiz Syed, who works at Wikimedia, pointed out on Twitter that Matthews' hit piece on Sanders popped up alongside a sponsorship from Walmart.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-draws-army-100000-volunteers-first-nationwide-organizing-eventBernie Sanders Draws Army of 100,000 Volunteers to First Nationwide Organizing Eventhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/104195244/0/alternet_election2012~Bernie-Sanders-Draws-Army-of-Volunteers-to-First-Nationwide-Organizing-Event

And this is from a man who is not taking corporate PAC money and is relying on small donors.

Over 100,000 people came together for Bernie Sanders' first nationwide organizing event on Wednesday. Sanders spoke to this army of volunteers via a video livestream, telling them they are needed if he is to overcome the power of what he calls the “billionaire class” – the tight group of the wealthy and corporations that own both the economy and political system.

Sanders, unlike his opponents, is not cultivating a super PAC. He's not taking corporate PAC money, and he is relying on small donors; 81 percent of his donations in the first quarter were from people giving less than $200.

This puts him at a huge monetary disadvantage. Two billionaire brothers in Texas gave a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC $15 million, as much money as Sanders has raised in his whole campaign. But Sanders has a plan to make up the difference: people power.

At an event I attended in East Cobb County – the backyard of some of the nation's GOP power elite, such as Newt Gingrich, Tom Price, and Bob Barr – scores of people crowded into a tavern called Varner's.

“I've been a lifelong Republican, worked in Republican government 35 years,” explained one attendee who said Bernie Sanders has won her over. A common refrain at the meeting was shock and surprise that there were so many progressives in this supposedly conservative part of Georgia. But there were dozens of events across the state. One attendee at a nearby meeting in Acworth, Georgia, reported 80 attendees. Closer to Atlanta, 150 packed into a local Teamsters hall to watch the Bernie Sanders address.

There were numerous meetings just like this all over America, ranging from left-wing hotbeds like Brooklyn, New York to “a town in the Alaskan wilderness of about 1,000 residents.”

The Sanders campaign has organized itself around the principle that organizing people is the only way to take on organized money. With the massive crowds the candidate is drawing at every stop and the enormous volunteer base the campaign has gathered, it looks like they will get a chance to test their theory.

And this is from a man who is not taking corporate PAC money and is relying on small donors.

Over 100,000 people came together for Bernie Sanders' first nationwide organizing event on Wednesday. Sanders spoke to this army of volunteers via a video livestream, telling them they are needed if he is to overcome the power of what he calls the “billionaire class” – the tight group of the wealthy and corporations that own both the economy and political system.

Sanders, unlike his opponents, is not cultivating a super PAC. He's not taking corporate PAC money, and he is relying on small donors; 81 percent of his donations in the first quarter were from people giving less than $200.

This puts him at a huge monetary disadvantage. Two billionaire brothers in Texas gave a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC $15 million, as much money as Sanders has raised in his whole campaign. But Sanders has a plan to make up the difference: people power.

At an event I attended in East Cobb County – the backyard of some of the nation's GOP power elite, such as Newt Gingrich, Tom Price, and Bob Barr – scores of people crowded into a tavern called Varner's.

“I've been a lifelong Republican, worked in Republican government 35 years,” explained one attendee who said Bernie Sanders has won her over. A common refrain at the meeting was shock and surprise that there were so many progressives in this supposedly conservative part of Georgia. But there were dozens of events across the state. One attendee at a nearby meeting in Acworth, Georgia, reported 80 attendees. Closer to Atlanta, 150 packed into a local Teamsters hall to watch the Bernie Sanders address.

There were numerous meetings just like this all over America, ranging from left-wing hotbeds like Brooklyn, New York to “a town in the Alaskan wilderness of about 1,000 residents.”

The Sanders campaign has organized itself around the principle that organizing people is the only way to take on organized money. With the massive crowds the candidate is drawing at every stop and the enormous volunteer base the campaign has gathered, it looks like they will get a chance to test their theory.

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-medicare-all-makes-more-sense-now-everWhy Medicare-For-All Makes More Sense Now Than Everhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/104519646/0/alternet_election2012~Why-MedicareForAll-Makes-More-Sense-Now-Than-Ever

Private health insurance drives up costs for everyone.

Medicare -- signed into law fifty years ago, on July 30, 1965 -- was supposed to be just the first step.

For the fifty years before Medicare's enactment, progressives had fought unsuccessfully for universal, government-provided health insurance. In 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party platform advocated universal, government-sponsored, health insurance, but he was defeated in his quest for another term as president. In 1917, the California legislature approved universal health insurance, and the governor supported it, but a 1918 ballot resolution defeated the measure after a massive, well-financed business and physician-fueled campaign against it. President Franklin Roosevelt seriously considered including national health insurance in his 1935 Social Security legislation, but decided against it out of fear that it would bring down the entire legislative package. President Harry Truman made universal health insurance a top priority, but got nowhere.

The five-decade long history of defeat convinced activists to shift to an incremental approach. They decided to start with a sympathetic group and debated which one that should be. The top candidates were seniors and children. On the one hand, covering children was relatively inexpensive and could lead to a lifetime of better health. On the other hand, seniors were most in need of health insurance and were already used to and supportive of Social Security's government-sponsored wage insurance. And they voted.

So the decision was made to start with them. The expectation was that, after Medicare was enacted, children and others would be quickly added. And, indeed, just seven years later, in 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law legislation which extended Medicare to people with serious and permanent disabilities.

But then came Watergate, distrust of government, and President Ronald Reagan's famous declaration, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Expansion of Medicare to children or other demographic groups disappeared from the public agenda. But the need for universal high-quality health care, efficiently provided, did not.

Conservatives and centrist Democrats, increasingly in control, looked for alternative approaches. Inclined toward private sector solutions but recognizing that some limited government role was essential, they favored private sector health insurance and savings supported by favorable tax treatment. For those who fell through the cracks and who were deemed worthy, they favored means-tested health insurance provided at the state level, with federal support.

Those are the solutions that have dominated since 1972, despite the obvious advantages of simply expanding Medicare. Means-tested Medicaid, included in the same 1965 legislation that enacted Medicare, was expanded every few years, most recently as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The means-tested State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was enacted in 1997. And, the Affordable Care Act authorized state exchanges offering private health insurance subsidized with income-tested, government subsidies. During these decades, the tax expenditure on health care insurance grew from the fourth largest tax expenditure in 1986 to the largest today -- at a loss of revenue of over $200 billion a year. And during this same period, conservatives amended Medicare to include private health insurance and means-tested elements.

But these methods of providing health insurance are vastly inferior to universal, government-sponsored health insurance -- essentially, Medicare for All. Universal, government-sponsored insurance is the most effective and efficient way to cover everyone. Insurance is least expensive when it covers the most people; the large size of government-sponsored health insurance provides economies of scale and the greatest ability to negotiate over prices and control costs. Moreover, unlike private health insurance, a government plan has no marketing costs and no high CEO salaries. It can provide health care less expensively and more efficiently for everyone. For these reasons, every other industrialized country provides universal coverage, spends less as a percentage of GDP, and produces better health outcomes.

But we don't have to look to other countries to see the advantages. Medicare covers seniors and people with disabilities, people who, on average, have the worst health and the most expensive medical conditions, requiring the largest numbers of doctor and hospital visits with the concomitant largest number of health care claims. Yet, Medicare's administrative costs are the lowest around. Medicaid, whose administrative costs vary from state to state, is less efficient than Medicare, because its coverage is statewide, not national, and it must impose complicated and expensive means testing, Even with that, both Medicare and Medicaid are significantly more efficient than private health insurance. Compared to Medicare's administrative costs of just 1.4 percent, the administrative costs of private health insurance sponsored by very small firms or purchased by individuals can run as high as 30 percent. Even the administrative costs of health insurance sponsored by large companies typically run around 7 percent.

As a stark illustration of the greater efficiency and effectiveness of Medicare, a proposal floated a few years ago to raise Medicare's initial age of eligibility from 65 to 67 -- requiring people to wait two additional years before they could enroll in Medicare -- would have resulted in increased health care costs for the nation as a whole of $5.7 billion a year and increased premium costs for both Medicare and all other health insurance of about 3 percent. Just as shrinking Medicare's coverage increases costs, expanding coverage would reduce overall health care costs

Imagine if President Bill Clinton in 1993 and President Barack Obama in 2009 had followed the direction of the architects of Medicare, a half century ago. Imagine if they had proposed incremental expansions of Medicare, including lowering the Medicare age to 62 or 55, creating a counterpart universal, government-sponsored Medikidsprogram, covering under Medicare people with pre-existing conditions, and providing all Americans the option of buying into Medicare. We likely would be on our way to Medicare for All, with all of its advantages. We likely would be forecasting long-termsurpluses in our federal budget, with all that would mean for greater spending on other pressing needs. Our businesses would be much more competitive. And we would join other nations in recognizing health care as a human right.

But it is not too late.

This upcoming presidential election could be a powerful defining moment. It could get us back on track to realizing the vision of the architects of Medicare a half century ago. Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) believes in Medicare for All, as well as expansion of Social Security. In contrast, Governor Jeb Bush is calling for the phasing out of Medicare and wants to cut Social Security. If each Party's platform reflects these views, the American people will have a clear choice.

I see no better way to celebrate Medicare reaching its fiftieth anniversary than to expand Medicare. If we follow the lead of those visionary architects fifty years ago, those who come after us will inherit a nation where affordable, first class health insurance -- Medicare for All -- is a birthright.

Medicare -- signed into law fifty years ago, on July 30, 1965 -- was supposed to be just the first step.

For the fifty years before Medicare's enactment, progressives had fought unsuccessfully for universal, government-provided health insurance. In 1912, President Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party platform advocated universal, government-sponsored, health insurance, but he was defeated in his quest for another term as president. In 1917, the California legislature approved universal health insurance, and the governor supported it, but a 1918 ballot resolution defeated the measure after a massive, well-financed business and physician-fueled campaign against it. President Franklin Roosevelt seriously considered including national health insurance in his 1935 Social Security legislation, but decided against it out of fear that it would bring down the entire legislative package. President Harry Truman made universal health insurance a top priority, but got nowhere.

The five-decade long history of defeat convinced activists to shift to an incremental approach. They decided to start with a sympathetic group and debated which one that should be. The top candidates were seniors and children. On the one hand, covering children was relatively inexpensive and could lead to a lifetime of better health. On the other hand, seniors were most in need of health insurance and were already used to and supportive of Social Security's government-sponsored wage insurance. And they voted.

So the decision was made to start with them. The expectation was that, after Medicare was enacted, children and others would be quickly added. And, indeed, just seven years later, in 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law legislation which extended Medicare to people with serious and permanent disabilities.

But then came Watergate, distrust of government, and President Ronald Reagan's famous declaration, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Expansion of Medicare to children or other demographic groups disappeared from the public agenda. But the need for universal high-quality health care, efficiently provided, did not.

Conservatives and centrist Democrats, increasingly in control, looked for alternative approaches. Inclined toward private sector solutions but recognizing that some limited government role was essential, they favored private sector health insurance and savings supported by favorable tax treatment. For those who fell through the cracks and who were deemed worthy, they favored means-tested health insurance provided at the state level, with federal support.

Those are the solutions that have dominated since 1972, despite the obvious advantages of simply expanding Medicare. Means-tested Medicaid, included in the same 1965 legislation that enacted Medicare, was expanded every few years, most recently as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The means-tested State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was enacted in 1997. And, the Affordable Care Act authorized state exchanges offering private health insurance subsidized with income-tested, government subsidies. During these decades, the tax expenditure on health care insurance grew from the fourth largest tax expenditure in 1986 to the largest today -- at a loss of revenue of over $200 billion a year. And during this same period, conservatives amended Medicare to include private health insurance and means-tested elements.

But these methods of providing health insurance are vastly inferior to universal, government-sponsored health insurance -- essentially, Medicare for All. Universal, government-sponsored insurance is the most effective and efficient way to cover everyone. Insurance is least expensive when it covers the most people; the large size of government-sponsored health insurance provides economies of scale and the greatest ability to negotiate over prices and control costs. Moreover, unlike private health insurance, a government plan has no marketing costs and no high CEO salaries. It can provide health care less expensively and more efficiently for everyone. For these reasons, every other industrialized country provides universal coverage, spends less as a percentage of GDP, and produces better health outcomes.

But we don't have to look to other countries to see the advantages. Medicare covers seniors and people with disabilities, people who, on average, have the worst health and the most expensive medical conditions, requiring the largest numbers of doctor and hospital visits with the concomitant largest number of health care claims. Yet, Medicare's administrative costs are the lowest around. Medicaid, whose administrative costs vary from state to state, is less efficient than Medicare, because its coverage is statewide, not national, and it must impose complicated and expensive means testing, Even with that, both Medicare and Medicaid are significantly more efficient than private health insurance. Compared to Medicare's administrative costs of just 1.4 percent, the administrative costs of private health insurance sponsored by very small firms or purchased by individuals can run as high as 30 percent. Even the administrative costs of health insurance sponsored by large companies typically run around 7 percent.

As a stark illustration of the greater efficiency and effectiveness of Medicare, a proposal floated a few years ago to raise Medicare's initial age of eligibility from 65 to 67 -- requiring people to wait two additional years before they could enroll in Medicare -- would have resulted in increased health care costs for the nation as a whole of $5.7 billion a year and increased premium costs for both Medicare and all other health insurance of about 3 percent. Just as shrinking Medicare's coverage increases costs, expanding coverage would reduce overall health care costs

Imagine if President Bill Clinton in 1993 and President Barack Obama in 2009 had followed the direction of the architects of Medicare, a half century ago. Imagine if they had proposed incremental expansions of Medicare, including lowering the Medicare age to 62 or 55, creating a counterpart universal, government-sponsored Medikidsprogram, covering under Medicare people with pre-existing conditions, and providing all Americans the option of buying into Medicare. We likely would be on our way to Medicare for All, with all of its advantages. We likely would be forecasting long-termsurpluses in our federal budget, with all that would mean for greater spending on other pressing needs. Our businesses would be much more competitive. And we would join other nations in recognizing health care as a human right.

But it is not too late.

This upcoming presidential election could be a powerful defining moment. It could get us back on track to realizing the vision of the architects of Medicare a half century ago. Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) believes in Medicare for All, as well as expansion of Social Security. In contrast, Governor Jeb Bush is calling for the phasing out of Medicare and wants to cut Social Security. If each Party's platform reflects these views, the American people will have a clear choice.

I see no better way to celebrate Medicare reaching its fiftieth anniversary than to expand Medicare. If we follow the lead of those visionary architects fifty years ago, those who come after us will inherit a nation where affordable, first class health insurance -- Medicare for All -- is a birthright.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/direct-democracy-work-ten-states-pot-legalization-initiative-effortsThe Marijuana Legalization Express: 10 States That Could Vote on It Next Yearhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/104155078/0/alternet_election2012~The-Marijuana-Legalization-Express-States-That-Could-Vote-on-It-Next-Year

After they count the ballots on election day next year, a whole lot of Americans could be living in legal marijuana states.

Marijuana is going to be part of the political conversation between now and Election Day 2016. Support for legalization is now consistently polling above 50% nationwide, four states and DC have already voted to legalize it, and activists in at least 10 states are doing their best to make pot an issue this time around.

In those 10 states, they're working to take marijuana legalization directly to the voters in the form of initiatives. Not all of those efforts will actually make the ballot—mass signature-gathering campaigns require not only enthusiasm but cold, hard cash to succeed—and not all of those that qualify will necessarily win, but in a handful of states, including the nation's most populous, the prospects for passing pot legalization next year look quite good.

Presidential contenders are already finding the question of pot legalization unavoidable. They're mostly finding the topic uncomfortable, with none—not even Rand Paul—embracing full-on legalization, most staking out middling positions, and some Republicans looking for traction by fervently opposing it. Just this week, Chris Christie vowed to undo legalization where it already exists if he is elected president.

It's worth noting that it is the initiative process that is enabling the process of ending pot prohibition. Only half the states have it—mostly west of the Mississippi—but the use of citizen initiatives has led the way first for medical marijuana legalization and now with outright legalization.

In the face of overwhelming support for medical marijuana, state legislators proved remarkably recalcitrant. It took five years after California voters made it the first medical marijuana state for Hawaii to become the first state to pass it at the legislature. Even now, with nearly half the states having approved some form of medical marijuana, getting such bills through legislatures is excruciatingly difficult, and results in overly restrictive and ineffective state programs.

It's been the same with legalization. Voters approved legalization via initiatives in Colorado and Washington in 2012 and Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia last year. But even in states with majorities or pluralities in favor of legalization, legalization bills haven't gotten passed.

Efforts are afoot at a number of statehouses, and one of them will eventually be the first to legislate legalization, maybe even next year (it's not outside the realm of possibility), but for now, if legalization is going to continue to expand, it's going to come thanks to the initiative states. In fact, marijuana policy reform is an issue on which elected officials have been so tin-eared and unresponsive to the will of the voters that their failure is an advertisement for the utility of direct democracy.

By the time the polls close on Election Day 2016, we could see the number of legalization states double and the number of Americans living free of pot prohibition quadruple to more than 60 million—or more. Attitudes on marijuana are shifting fast, and by this time next year, the prospects of even more states actually approving legalization could be even higher.

But right now, we have five states where the prospects of getting on the ballot and winning look good, three states where it looks iffy but could surprise, and four states where it looks like a long-shot next year.

Looking Good for Legalization

Arizona

A June Rocky Mountain Poll from the Behavioral Research Center has support for legalization at 53%, and Arizonans could find themselves having to decide which competing legalization proposal they like best.

The Marijuana Policy Project-backed Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds or five grams of concentrates, as well as allow home grows of up to six plants per person, with a cap of 12 plants per household. The initiative also envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a tax of 15%. Localities could bar pot businesses or even home growing, but only upon a popular vote.

The second initiative, from Arizonans for Mindful Regulation, would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds or concentrates, as well as allow for home grows of up to 12 plants, and home growers could keep the fruits of their harvests. The initiative envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a 10% tax on retail sales. It would allow localities to regulate, but not ban marijuana businesses.

Both campaigns are in the signature-gathering process. They will need 150,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the 2016 ballot and they have until next July to get them.

California

A May PPIC poll had support for legalization at 54%, and Californians have a variety of initiatives to choose from. At least six legalization initiatives have already been cleared for signature-gathering by state officials, but everybody is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That would be the much anticipated initiative from the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform, which represents many of the major players in the state, as well as deep-pocketed outside players from all the major drug reform groups. The coalition's initiative was delayed while it waited for the release of a report from Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy, led by pro-legalization Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). That report came out last week, and the coalition says it expects to have its initiative ready within a few weeks.

The delays in getting the initiative out and the signature-gathering campaign underway are going to put pressure on the campaign. To qualify for the ballot, initiatives must come up with some 366,000 valid voter signatures, and that takes time, as well as money. Most of the other initiatives don't have the money to make a serious run at signatures, but the coalition does. For all of the California legalization initiatives, the real hard deadline for signatures is February 4.

Maine

The most recent polling, a Public Policy Polling survey from 2013, had only a plurality (48% to 39%) favoring legalization, but that's nearly two years old, and if Maine is following national trends, support should only have increased since then. Maine is winnable.

This is another state where a Marijuana Policy Project-backed initiative has competition from local activists. The MPP-affiliated Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol would legalize possession of up to an ounce of buds and allow for six-plant home grows. It would also create a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a 10% tax above and beyond the state sales tax, and it would allow for marijuana social clubs as well as retail stores.

The competing initiative, from Legalize Maine, is a bit looser on possession and home grows, allowing up to 2.5 ounces and six mature and 12 immature plants. Unlike the MPP initiative, which would have the Alcohol Bureau regulate marijuana, this one would leave it to the Department of Agriculture. It would also allow for marijuana social clubs as well as pot shops and would impose a 10% flat sales tax.

Initiatives need 61,126 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. The campaigns have until next spring to get them in.

Massachusetts

A Suffolk/Boston Herald poll from February has support for legalization at 53% in the Bay State, where activists have since the turn of the century been laying the groundwork for legalization with a series of successful non-binding policy questions demonstrating public support, not to mention voting to approve medical marijuana in 2008 and decriminalization in 2012.

Like Arizona and Maine, Massachusetts is another state where a Marijuana Policy Project-backed initiative is being contested by local activists. The MPP-affiliated Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is still in the initiative-drafting process and details of its initiative remain unknown.

Meanwhile, local activists organized as Bay State Repeal have come up with a very liberal initiative that would legalize possession and cultivation—without limits—and allow for marijuana farmers' markets and social clubs. This initiative would also create a system of licensed, regulated and taxed marijuana commerce.

Neither Massachusetts initiative has been approved for signature-gathering yet. The state has a two-phase signature-gathering process, with a first phase for nine weeks between September and December. Then, if sufficient signatures are gathered, the legislature must act on the measure before next May. If it fails to approve the measure, a second, eight-week signature-gathering process commences. Initiatives will need 64,750 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Nevada

A Moore Information poll from 2013 had support for legalization at 54%, and legalization supporters will most definitely have a chance to put those numbers to the test next year because the Marijuana Policy Project-backed Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol initiative has already qualified for the ballot. It would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds and an eight-ounce of concentrates, and it would allow for the home growing of six pot plants per adult, with a household limit of 12. Home growers could keep the fruits of their harvest. The initiative would also create a legal marijuana commerce system with a 15% excise tax.

There's a Decent Chance

Michigan

An April Michigan Poll had support for legalization at 51%, which doesn't leave much margin for error. Nonetheless, at least two groups are embarked on legalization initiative campaigns (a third appears to have gone dormant).

The more grassroots Comprehensive Cannabis Law Reform Initiative Committee would legalize the possession of up to 2.5 ounces by adults and allow home grows of 12 mature plants and an unlimited number of immature ones. Home growers could possess the fruits of all their harvest. The non-commercial transfer of up to 2 ½ ounces would also be legal. A system of regulated marijuana commerce is included and would feature a 10% tax.

The competing Michigan Cannabis Coalition initiative appears to have no personal possession limits, but would only allow for home grows of two plants. It provides an option for localities to ban home grows, or to raise the limit to four plants. It envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce, with taxes to be set by the legislature.

Michigan only rates the "decent chance" category because of its razor-thin support for legalization and because of its history of marijuana legalization initiatives failing to qualify for the ballot. Initiatives will need more than 250,000 voter signatures to qualify, and they have until next June 1 to do so. Both campaigns have just gotten underway with signature-gathering.

Missouri

A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research poll from February showed only 45% in favor of marijuana legalization, but Missouri activists organized as Show-Me Cannabis have been waging a serious, hard-fought campaign to educate Missourians on the issue, and it could pay off next year.

Their initiative would legalize up to 12 ounces of buds, one ounce of concentrates, a pound of edibles and 20 ounces of cannabis liquids, as well as allow for home grows of up to six plants. It would also create a medical marijuana program and a legal, regulated marijuana commerce.

Since it is a constitutional amendment, the initiative will need at least 157,788 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. Organizers will have until next May to get them.

Ohio

Ohio is a special case. The ResponsibleOhio initiative either will or will not have qualified for the ballot by midnight Thursday. If it qualifies, the state could well be the next one to legalize marijuana, since it would go to a vote this November. An April Quinnipiac University poll had support for legalization at 52%.

If it doesn't qualify, others are lined up to take another shot. Responsible Ohioans for Cannabis have a constitutional amendment initiative with no specified possession limits for people 18 and over. It also allows home grows of 24 plants per person, with a limit of 96 plants per household.

Constitutional amendments need 385,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot; initiated statutes only need 115,000. Like Michigan, however, Ohio is a state with a history of initiatives failing to make the ballot.

Not Likely Next Year

In the states below, activists are undertaking efforts to get on the ballot next year, but the odds are against them, either because of poor (or no) polling, or lack of funds and organization, or both.

Mississippi

The Mississippi Alliance for Cannabis is sponsoring Proposition 48, a constitutional amendment initiative that "would legalize the use, cultivation and sale of cannabis and industrial hemp. Cannabis related crimes would be punished in a manner similar to, or to a lesser degree, than alcohol related crimes. Cannabis sales would be taxed 7%. Cannabis sold for medical purposes and industrial hemp would be exempt from taxation. The Governor would be required to pardon persons convicted of non-violent cannabis crimes against the State of Mississippi."

There is no recent polling on attitudes toward legalization in the state, but it is one of the most conservative in the country. To get on the ballot, supporters need to gather 107,216 valid voter signatures by December 17, one year after they started seeking them.

Montana

Ballot Issue 7, which would legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana by adults, but not create a legal marijuana commerce, is the brainchild of a Glendive man who says he plans to bicycle across the state to gather support and signatures.

Prospects for 2016

Five states are well-positioned to legalize marijuana via initiatives next year, another three could possibly do it, and that would be further evidence that the apparent ongoing sea change in marijuana policy is no fluke. It's going to be interesting.

After they count the ballots on election day next year, a whole lot of Americans could be living in legal marijuana states.

Marijuana is going to be part of the political conversation between now and Election Day 2016. Support for legalization is now consistently polling above 50% nationwide, four states and DC have already voted to legalize it, and activists in at least 10 states are doing their best to make pot an issue this time around.

In those 10 states, they're working to take marijuana legalization directly to the voters in the form of initiatives. Not all of those efforts will actually make the ballot—mass signature-gathering campaigns require not only enthusiasm but cold, hard cash to succeed—and not all of those that qualify will necessarily win, but in a handful of states, including the nation's most populous, the prospects for passing pot legalization next year look quite good.

Presidential contenders are already finding the question of pot legalization unavoidable. They're mostly finding the topic uncomfortable, with none—not even Rand Paul—embracing full-on legalization, most staking out middling positions, and some Republicans looking for traction by fervently opposing it. Just this week, Chris Christie vowed to undo legalization where it already exists if he is elected president.

It's worth noting that it is the initiative process that is enabling the process of ending pot prohibition. Only half the states have it—mostly west of the Mississippi—but the use of citizen initiatives has led the way first for medical marijuana legalization and now with outright legalization.

In the face of overwhelming support for medical marijuana, state legislators proved remarkably recalcitrant. It took five years after California voters made it the first medical marijuana state for Hawaii to become the first state to pass it at the legislature. Even now, with nearly half the states having approved some form of medical marijuana, getting such bills through legislatures is excruciatingly difficult, and results in overly restrictive and ineffective state programs.

It's been the same with legalization. Voters approved legalization via initiatives in Colorado and Washington in 2012 and Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia last year. But even in states with majorities or pluralities in favor of legalization, legalization bills haven't gotten passed.

Efforts are afoot at a number of statehouses, and one of them will eventually be the first to legislate legalization, maybe even next year (it's not outside the realm of possibility), but for now, if legalization is going to continue to expand, it's going to come thanks to the initiative states. In fact, marijuana policy reform is an issue on which elected officials have been so tin-eared and unresponsive to the will of the voters that their failure is an advertisement for the utility of direct democracy.

By the time the polls close on Election Day 2016, we could see the number of legalization states double and the number of Americans living free of pot prohibition quadruple to more than 60 million—or more. Attitudes on marijuana are shifting fast, and by this time next year, the prospects of even more states actually approving legalization could be even higher.

But right now, we have five states where the prospects of getting on the ballot and winning look good, three states where it looks iffy but could surprise, and four states where it looks like a long-shot next year.

Looking Good for Legalization

Arizona

A June Rocky Mountain Poll from the Behavioral Research Center has support for legalization at 53%, and Arizonans could find themselves having to decide which competing legalization proposal they like best.

The Marijuana Policy Project-backed Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds or five grams of concentrates, as well as allow home grows of up to six plants per person, with a cap of 12 plants per household. The initiative also envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a tax of 15%. Localities could bar pot businesses or even home growing, but only upon a popular vote.

The second initiative, from Arizonans for Mindful Regulation, would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds or concentrates, as well as allow for home grows of up to 12 plants, and home growers could keep the fruits of their harvests. The initiative envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a 10% tax on retail sales. It would allow localities to regulate, but not ban marijuana businesses.

Both campaigns are in the signature-gathering process. They will need 150,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the 2016 ballot and they have until next July to get them.

California

A May PPIC poll had support for legalization at 54%, and Californians have a variety of initiatives to choose from. At least six legalization initiatives have already been cleared for signature-gathering by state officials, but everybody is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That would be the much anticipated initiative from the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform, which represents many of the major players in the state, as well as deep-pocketed outside players from all the major drug reform groups. The coalition's initiative was delayed while it waited for the release of a report from Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy, led by pro-legalization Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). That report came out last week, and the coalition says it expects to have its initiative ready within a few weeks.

The delays in getting the initiative out and the signature-gathering campaign underway are going to put pressure on the campaign. To qualify for the ballot, initiatives must come up with some 366,000 valid voter signatures, and that takes time, as well as money. Most of the other initiatives don't have the money to make a serious run at signatures, but the coalition does. For all of the California legalization initiatives, the real hard deadline for signatures is February 4.

Maine

The most recent polling, a Public Policy Polling survey from 2013, had only a plurality (48% to 39%) favoring legalization, but that's nearly two years old, and if Maine is following national trends, support should only have increased since then. Maine is winnable.

This is another state where a Marijuana Policy Project-backed initiative has competition from local activists. The MPP-affiliated Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol would legalize possession of up to an ounce of buds and allow for six-plant home grows. It would also create a system of regulated marijuana commerce with a 10% tax above and beyond the state sales tax, and it would allow for marijuana social clubs as well as retail stores.

The competing initiative, from Legalize Maine, is a bit looser on possession and home grows, allowing up to 2.5 ounces and six mature and 12 immature plants. Unlike the MPP initiative, which would have the Alcohol Bureau regulate marijuana, this one would leave it to the Department of Agriculture. It would also allow for marijuana social clubs as well as pot shops and would impose a 10% flat sales tax.

Initiatives need 61,126 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. The campaigns have until next spring to get them in.

Massachusetts

A Suffolk/Boston Herald poll from February has support for legalization at 53% in the Bay State, where activists have since the turn of the century been laying the groundwork for legalization with a series of successful non-binding policy questions demonstrating public support, not to mention voting to approve medical marijuana in 2008 and decriminalization in 2012.

Like Arizona and Maine, Massachusetts is another state where a Marijuana Policy Project-backed initiative is being contested by local activists. The MPP-affiliated Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is still in the initiative-drafting process and details of its initiative remain unknown.

Meanwhile, local activists organized as Bay State Repeal have come up with a very liberal initiative that would legalize possession and cultivation—without limits—and allow for marijuana farmers' markets and social clubs. This initiative would also create a system of licensed, regulated and taxed marijuana commerce.

Neither Massachusetts initiative has been approved for signature-gathering yet. The state has a two-phase signature-gathering process, with a first phase for nine weeks between September and December. Then, if sufficient signatures are gathered, the legislature must act on the measure before next May. If it fails to approve the measure, a second, eight-week signature-gathering process commences. Initiatives will need 64,750 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Nevada

A Moore Information poll from 2013 had support for legalization at 54%, and legalization supporters will most definitely have a chance to put those numbers to the test next year because the Marijuana Policy Project-backed Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol initiative has already qualified for the ballot. It would legalize the possession of up to an ounce of buds and an eight-ounce of concentrates, and it would allow for the home growing of six pot plants per adult, with a household limit of 12. Home growers could keep the fruits of their harvest. The initiative would also create a legal marijuana commerce system with a 15% excise tax.

There's a Decent Chance

Michigan

An April Michigan Poll had support for legalization at 51%, which doesn't leave much margin for error. Nonetheless, at least two groups are embarked on legalization initiative campaigns (a third appears to have gone dormant).

The more grassroots Comprehensive Cannabis Law Reform Initiative Committee would legalize the possession of up to 2.5 ounces by adults and allow home grows of 12 mature plants and an unlimited number of immature ones. Home growers could possess the fruits of all their harvest. The non-commercial transfer of up to 2 ½ ounces would also be legal. A system of regulated marijuana commerce is included and would feature a 10% tax.

The competing Michigan Cannabis Coalition initiative appears to have no personal possession limits, but would only allow for home grows of two plants. It provides an option for localities to ban home grows, or to raise the limit to four plants. It envisions a system of regulated marijuana commerce, with taxes to be set by the legislature.

Michigan only rates the "decent chance" category because of its razor-thin support for legalization and because of its history of marijuana legalization initiatives failing to qualify for the ballot. Initiatives will need more than 250,000 voter signatures to qualify, and they have until next June 1 to do so. Both campaigns have just gotten underway with signature-gathering.

Missouri

A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research poll from February showed only 45% in favor of marijuana legalization, but Missouri activists organized as Show-Me Cannabis have been waging a serious, hard-fought campaign to educate Missourians on the issue, and it could pay off next year.

Their initiative would legalize up to 12 ounces of buds, one ounce of concentrates, a pound of edibles and 20 ounces of cannabis liquids, as well as allow for home grows of up to six plants. It would also create a medical marijuana program and a legal, regulated marijuana commerce.

Since it is a constitutional amendment, the initiative will need at least 157,788 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. Organizers will have until next May to get them.

Ohio

Ohio is a special case. The ResponsibleOhio initiative either will or will not have qualified for the ballot by midnight Thursday. If it qualifies, the state could well be the next one to legalize marijuana, since it would go to a vote this November. An April Quinnipiac University poll had support for legalization at 52%.

If it doesn't qualify, others are lined up to take another shot. Responsible Ohioans for Cannabis have a constitutional amendment initiative with no specified possession limits for people 18 and over. It also allows home grows of 24 plants per person, with a limit of 96 plants per household.

Constitutional amendments need 385,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot; initiated statutes only need 115,000. Like Michigan, however, Ohio is a state with a history of initiatives failing to make the ballot.

Not Likely Next Year

In the states below, activists are undertaking efforts to get on the ballot next year, but the odds are against them, either because of poor (or no) polling, or lack of funds and organization, or both.

Mississippi

The Mississippi Alliance for Cannabis is sponsoring Proposition 48, a constitutional amendment initiative that "would legalize the use, cultivation and sale of cannabis and industrial hemp. Cannabis related crimes would be punished in a manner similar to, or to a lesser degree, than alcohol related crimes. Cannabis sales would be taxed 7%. Cannabis sold for medical purposes and industrial hemp would be exempt from taxation. The Governor would be required to pardon persons convicted of non-violent cannabis crimes against the State of Mississippi."

There is no recent polling on attitudes toward legalization in the state, but it is one of the most conservative in the country. To get on the ballot, supporters need to gather 107,216 valid voter signatures by December 17, one year after they started seeking them.

Montana

Ballot Issue 7, which would legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana by adults, but not create a legal marijuana commerce, is the brainchild of a Glendive man who says he plans to bicycle across the state to gather support and signatures.

Prospects for 2016

Five states are well-positioned to legalize marijuana via initiatives next year, another three could possibly do it, and that would be further evidence that the apparent ongoing sea change in marijuana policy is no fluke. It's going to be interesting.

Typically when a Republican politician who opposes immigration reform is asked what he or she would do with the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., they usually give a non-answer or avoid the question altogether.

But Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, a former official with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, is at least giving an honest answer, telling conservative radio host John Fredericks yesterdaythat Trump wants to deport the 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants living here.

“You guys are going to be committed to basically rounding anyone who is here illegally, rounding them up, and sending them back?” Fredericks asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Lewandowski replied, before going on to claim that there may be upwards of 30 million undocumented immigrants in the country, a bogus figure that has previously been cited by Trump. Lewandowski, sounding just like Trump, said that undocumented immigrants are killing American citizens” and that a President Trump would build an “impenetrable” border wall: “It doesn’t matter how much water you have in your boat if you don’t stop the water from coming in you are eventually going to sink, so the first thing to do is to plug the hole, and that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to build a wall that stops that from continuing.”

He then channeled Mitt Romney by talking about the need for “self-deportation” by making their lives difficult in the U.S. “We’re going to deport everybody and then you have the opportunity to apply to an expedited process,” he said.

Amazingly, as we noted earlier today, even with his campaign making statements like this, Trump is still not seen as extreme enough in his anti-immigrant politics by Numbers USA, the most influential anti-immigrant lobbying group. This is because Trump, although he wants to deport all of the undocumented immigrants in the country, has vaguely hinted at offering an “expedited” process for the “good” ones to apply to return. And remember, back in 2012 Trump was calling Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” stance “crazy.”

"He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal," Trump told Newsmax. "It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote." Trump added that the GOP should develop better policies "with respect to people wanting to be wonderful, productive citizens of this country."

Typically when a Republican politician who opposes immigration reform is asked what he or she would do with the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., they usually give a non-answer or avoid the question altogether.

But Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, a former official with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, is at least giving an honest answer, telling conservative radio host John Fredericks yesterdaythat Trump wants to deport the 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants living here.

“You guys are going to be committed to basically rounding anyone who is here illegally, rounding them up, and sending them back?” Fredericks asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Lewandowski replied, before going on to claim that there may be upwards of 30 million undocumented immigrants in the country, a bogus figure that has previously been cited by Trump. Lewandowski, sounding just like Trump, said that undocumented immigrants are killing American citizens” and that a President Trump would build an “impenetrable” border wall: “It doesn’t matter how much water you have in your boat if you don’t stop the water from coming in you are eventually going to sink, so the first thing to do is to plug the hole, and that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to build a wall that stops that from continuing.”

He then channeled Mitt Romney by talking about the need for “self-deportation” by making their lives difficult in the U.S. “We’re going to deport everybody and then you have the opportunity to apply to an expedited process,” he said.

Amazingly, as we noted earlier today, even with his campaign making statements like this, Trump is still not seen as extreme enough in his anti-immigrant politics by Numbers USA, the most influential anti-immigrant lobbying group. This is because Trump, although he wants to deport all of the undocumented immigrants in the country, has vaguely hinted at offering an “expedited” process for the “good” ones to apply to return. And remember, back in 2012 Trump was calling Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” stance “crazy.”

"He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal," Trump told Newsmax. "It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote." Trump added that the GOP should develop better policies "with respect to people wanting to be wonderful, productive citizens of this country."

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-donald-trump-can-say-anything-and-get-away-itWhy Donald Trump Can Say Anything and Get Away With Ithttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/103999726/0/alternet_election2012~Why-Donald-Trump-Can-Say-Anything-and-Get-Away-With-It

No matter how bad he gets, he retains his support.

It’s hard to believe that only a couple of weeks ago everyone assumed that Donald Trump was finished for saying that John McCain wasn’t a war hero. The glee with which the Republican poobahs declared him dead was palpable, and the blithe assumption that one of the beltway media’s favorites, John McCain, was unassailable on his war record was universal. They were, of course, all wrong. Donald Trump can say anything and get away with it, at least as far as 25 percent of the GOP base is concerned. And remember this: That 25 percent adds up to millions of Americans.

Many of us pointed out the contrast between the uproar over Trump’s McCain insults and the more muted response to his degrading comments about Mexicans, but in the end it didn’t add up to much. Trump’s numbers continued to rise. We don’t know if they will rise again on the revelations that his former wife once accused him of rape during their contentious divorce nearly 30 years ago; but the media, at least, has decided that nobody will care about that since his wife issued a statement at the time saying that she didn’t mean it.

Even still, you have to wonder whether the comments his “special counsel” and spokesman Michael Cohen made this week might be something that finally forces Trump on the defensive. Here’s a sample of what he said to a Daily Beast reporter when asked for comment about the charges aired in Trumps divorce back in 1991:

“You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”[Emphasis added]

“It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into… she felt raped emotionally… She was not referring to it [as] a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.”

“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

“Though there’s many literal senses to the word, if you distort it, and you put Mr. Trump’s name there onto it, rest assured, you will suffer the consequences. So you do whatever you want. You want to ruin your life at the age of 20? You do that, and I’ll be happy to serve it right up to you.”

Threatening reporters will likely not hurt Trump. People like that. In fact, they cheer it on both sides of the aisle. Neither is it likely that the “special counsel’s” erroneous assertion that marital rape is not illegal hurt Trump. The sad fact is that marital rape wasn’t illegal in many states until quite recently. As Irin Carmon wrote in this piece for MSNBC, many right wingers still maintain that it shouldn’t be. This quote from O.G. movement leader Phyllis Schlafly best exemplifies the rationale:

“I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That’s what marriage is all about, I don’t know if maybe these girls missed sex ed… When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn’t rape, it’s a he said-she said where it’s just too easy to lie about it … Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them.”

I thought Schlafly was against all Sex Ed, but apparently she thinks it’s fine as long as it teaches women that saying “I do” on their wedding day is the last time she’ll ever be asked if she wants to have sex.

Schlafly’s comments track with another Republican, a state Senator, who shared a bit of wisdom from his daddy, who told him that he should be careful because if he gets a girl pregnant she’ll claim she was raped. He charmingly elaborated on the idea by saying, “some girls, they rape so easy.” So basically, in the view of these conservatives, all women, married or not, commonly lie about being raped. And this is used to excuse their heartless insistence, of fairly recent vintage, that a woman should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s offspring.

So none of Cohen’s comments are likely to hurt the Donald with his fans. Even if they think Ivana Trump was telling the truth in her original deposition, they would tend to think she had no right to deny him his marital prerogatives. This is why they like Trump — he takes what he wants.

Trump’s key lieutenants tend to fit the same consumer profile as his discount luxury-brand targets: They are men with middle- and working-class roots; lacking in elite credentials; mesmerized by made-for-TV displays of lavish wealth. They are impressed with brashness and bored by subtlety. They are amused by dirty jokes and averse to irony. They are likely to buy a Trump-branded necktie sometime this year, and if they feel like splurging they’ll get the matching cufflinks, too.

This isn’t a caricature I came up with; it is central to the ethos of Trump’s political operation. On the day after the 2012 election, one of Trump’s advisers described for me the billionaire’s appeal to blue-collar voters: “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.” That may be crass, but it didn’t strike me as elitist: Trump’s political advisers see themselves as descendants of this same tribe.

That description is very reminiscent of another tribe with which one might be familiar if you watched “The Sopranos.” The swagger, the ostentatious show of wealth — and the threats.

“To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again…”

That’s what Donald Trump’s candidacy really promises. Goodfellas only look out for themselves.

If Trump remains at the top of the field for much longer, it’s hard to imagine that his “special counsel’s” style of speaking won’t end up spurring some people to take a closer look at Trump’s business dealings over the years. This piece by David Kay Johnston in the National Memo raises some very interesting questions along those lines. But I wouldn’t expect the real dirt in these matters to come from an enterprising journalist’s shoe-leather reporting. This is the kind of thing at which GOP oppo-research teams excel. If Trump takes a tumble in the polls because of information along these lines, he shouldn’t threaten the media company that revealed it. It was most likely fed to them by one of his rivals, perhaps even this guy.

It’s hard to believe that only a couple of weeks ago everyone assumed that Donald Trump was finished for saying that John McCain wasn’t a war hero. The glee with which the Republican poobahs declared him dead was palpable, and the blithe assumption that one of the beltway media’s favorites, John McCain, was unassailable on his war record was universal. They were, of course, all wrong. Donald Trump can say anything and get away with it, at least as far as 25 percent of the GOP base is concerned. And remember this: That 25 percent adds up to millions of Americans.

Many of us pointed out the contrast between the uproar over Trump’s McCain insults and the more muted response to his degrading comments about Mexicans, but in the end it didn’t add up to much. Trump’s numbers continued to rise. We don’t know if they will rise again on the revelations that his former wife once accused him of rape during their contentious divorce nearly 30 years ago; but the media, at least, has decided that nobody will care about that since his wife issued a statement at the time saying that she didn’t mean it.

Even still, you have to wonder whether the comments his “special counsel” and spokesman Michael Cohen made this week might be something that finally forces Trump on the defensive. Here’s a sample of what he said to a Daily Beast reporter when asked for comment about the charges aired in Trumps divorce back in 1991:

“You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”[Emphasis added]

“It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into… she felt raped emotionally… She was not referring to it [as] a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.”

“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

“Though there’s many literal senses to the word, if you distort it, and you put Mr. Trump’s name there onto it, rest assured, you will suffer the consequences. So you do whatever you want. You want to ruin your life at the age of 20? You do that, and I’ll be happy to serve it right up to you.”

Threatening reporters will likely not hurt Trump. People like that. In fact, they cheer it on both sides of the aisle. Neither is it likely that the “special counsel’s” erroneous assertion that marital rape is not illegal hurt Trump. The sad fact is that marital rape wasn’t illegal in many states until quite recently. As Irin Carmon wrote in this piece for MSNBC, many right wingers still maintain that it shouldn’t be. This quote from O.G. movement leader Phyllis Schlafly best exemplifies the rationale:

“I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That’s what marriage is all about, I don’t know if maybe these girls missed sex ed… When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn’t rape, it’s a he said-she said where it’s just too easy to lie about it … Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them.”

I thought Schlafly was against all Sex Ed, but apparently she thinks it’s fine as long as it teaches women that saying “I do” on their wedding day is the last time she’ll ever be asked if she wants to have sex.

Schlafly’s comments track with another Republican, a state Senator, who shared a bit of wisdom from his daddy, who told him that he should be careful because if he gets a girl pregnant she’ll claim she was raped. He charmingly elaborated on the idea by saying, “some girls, they rape so easy.” So basically, in the view of these conservatives, all women, married or not, commonly lie about being raped. And this is used to excuse their heartless insistence, of fairly recent vintage, that a woman should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s offspring.

So none of Cohen’s comments are likely to hurt the Donald with his fans. Even if they think Ivana Trump was telling the truth in her original deposition, they would tend to think she had no right to deny him his marital prerogatives. This is why they like Trump — he takes what he wants.

Trump’s key lieutenants tend to fit the same consumer profile as his discount luxury-brand targets: They are men with middle- and working-class roots; lacking in elite credentials; mesmerized by made-for-TV displays of lavish wealth. They are impressed with brashness and bored by subtlety. They are amused by dirty jokes and averse to irony. They are likely to buy a Trump-branded necktie sometime this year, and if they feel like splurging they’ll get the matching cufflinks, too.

This isn’t a caricature I came up with; it is central to the ethos of Trump’s political operation. On the day after the 2012 election, one of Trump’s advisers described for me the billionaire’s appeal to blue-collar voters: “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.” That may be crass, but it didn’t strike me as elitist: Trump’s political advisers see themselves as descendants of this same tribe.

That description is very reminiscent of another tribe with which one might be familiar if you watched “The Sopranos.” The swagger, the ostentatious show of wealth — and the threats.

“To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again…”

That’s what Donald Trump’s candidacy really promises. Goodfellas only look out for themselves.

If Trump remains at the top of the field for much longer, it’s hard to imagine that his “special counsel’s” style of speaking won’t end up spurring some people to take a closer look at Trump’s business dealings over the years. This piece by David Kay Johnston in the National Memo raises some very interesting questions along those lines. But I wouldn’t expect the real dirt in these matters to come from an enterprising journalist’s shoe-leather reporting. This is the kind of thing at which GOP oppo-research teams excel. If Trump takes a tumble in the polls because of information along these lines, he shouldn’t threaten the media company that revealed it. It was most likely fed to them by one of his rivals, perhaps even this guy.

Related Stories

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/jeb-bushs-and-bill-clintons-boasts-economic-growth-based-market-bubbles-burstJeb Bush's and Bill Clinton's Boasts of Economic Growth Based on Market Bubbles That Bursthttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/103951618/0/alternet_election2012~Jeb-Bushs-and-Bill-Clintons-Boasts-of-Economic-Growth-Based-on-Market-Bubbles-That-Burst

The good times rolled until they crashed and burned.

Paul Krugman rightly mocks Jeb Bush for taking credit for the strong growth in Florida during his tenure as governor.

As Krugman points out, the reason for the strong growth was that Florida had one of the worst housing bubbles in the country. Its collapse gave Florida one of the worst downturns in the country. (I had made the same point a couple weeks earlier to a reporter fact-checking Bush's claim on growth.) The weak banking regulation that facilitated the bubble is not the sort of thing you would think the Bush campaign wants to boast about.

But it is not just Governor Bush who is prone to boasting about bubble driven growth.

The boom in the last four years of the Clinton presidency was largely driven by the stock bubble that developed in these years, with price to earning ratio rising to levels not seen since the 1920s. The collapse of this bubble gave us the recession in 2001. While this downturn was very mild if measured by GDP, from the standpoint of the labor market it was quite severe. We did not get back the jobs lost in the downturn until January of 2005. Until the more recent recession this was the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression.

The interesting lesson from the 1990s boom was that the economy could sustain much lower rates of unemployment than had been previously believed. The unemployment rate hit 4.0 percent as a year-round average in 2000, most economists had previously argued that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6.0 percent without causing spiraling inflation. This indicated that as a supply side matter, the economy could support the high levels of employment/low levels of unemployment of the late 1990s.

However, the problem is the demand side. The channels to create the demand needed to get to low rates of unemployment — either larger budget deficits or lower trade deficits caused by a lower valued dollar — are blocked politically. (We could also look to reduce work hours through work-sharing, more vacation, paid family leave, etc.) This means that we may not see a strong labor market, like the one of the late 1990s, for some time.

But the key point here is that both parties are happy to take credit for bubble driven growth. Maybe there can be a quid pro quo where Jeb Bush will stop taking credit for the growth generated by the Florida housing bubble and the Democrats stop taking credit for the bubble driven growth of the Clinton years.

Paul Krugman rightly mocks Jeb Bush for taking credit for the strong growth in Florida during his tenure as governor.

As Krugman points out, the reason for the strong growth was that Florida had one of the worst housing bubbles in the country. Its collapse gave Florida one of the worst downturns in the country. (I had made the same point a couple weeks earlier to a reporter fact-checking Bush's claim on growth.) The weak banking regulation that facilitated the bubble is not the sort of thing you would think the Bush campaign wants to boast about.

But it is not just Governor Bush who is prone to boasting about bubble driven growth.

The boom in the last four years of the Clinton presidency was largely driven by the stock bubble that developed in these years, with price to earning ratio rising to levels not seen since the 1920s. The collapse of this bubble gave us the recession in 2001. While this downturn was very mild if measured by GDP, from the standpoint of the labor market it was quite severe. We did not get back the jobs lost in the downturn until January of 2005. Until the more recent recession this was the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression.

The interesting lesson from the 1990s boom was that the economy could sustain much lower rates of unemployment than had been previously believed. The unemployment rate hit 4.0 percent as a year-round average in 2000, most economists had previously argued that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6.0 percent without causing spiraling inflation. This indicated that as a supply side matter, the economy could support the high levels of employment/low levels of unemployment of the late 1990s.

However, the problem is the demand side. The channels to create the demand needed to get to low rates of unemployment — either larger budget deficits or lower trade deficits caused by a lower valued dollar — are blocked politically. (We could also look to reduce work hours through work-sharing, more vacation, paid family leave, etc.) This means that we may not see a strong labor market, like the one of the late 1990s, for some time.

But the key point here is that both parties are happy to take credit for bubble driven growth. Maybe there can be a quid pro quo where Jeb Bush will stop taking credit for the growth generated by the Florida housing bubble and the Democrats stop taking credit for the bubble driven growth of the Clinton years.

New details on a court deposition paint the Donald in a predictably unflattering light.

The media storm surrounding Donald Trump rolls on as Trump solidifies his frontrunner status and roars toward the first Republican debates unscathed by controversy or his GOP opponents.

Call him the Teflon Don, here are the latest developments in the Trump Show.

1. Trump defends Huckabee’s “oven” Holocaust comparison.

Mike Huckabee has repeatedly refused to apologize for his comment blasting the Iranian nuclear deal in which he claimed the deal allows President Obama to “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Trump thinks that’s just alright.

“I think he’s a very good guy, Huckabee, by the way, and I’m really OK with it,” Trump told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “Some people are saying, ‘Oh, the tone,’ and I saw Jeb Bush, who I also think is a nice person, but it’s not about tone. I mean, they’re chopping off Christians’ heads in Syria and lots of other places and we’re worried about tone. I think what Mike has done is he has hit a nerve and he’s made people think a little bit.”

2. Trump once yelled at breast-pumping woman, “You’re disgusting.”

As Republican primary voters insist on treating Trump as a serious presidential contender, media outlets appear obliged to follow suit and The Donald’s public history has come under increased scrutiny. The latest revelation comes via the New York Times that reports on a lawyer who claims Trump once yelled at her and called her “disgusting” after she tried to take a break to pump breast milk during a deposition for a lawsuit:

When the lawyer, Elizabeth Beck, asked for a medical break, Mr. Trump and his lawyers objected, demanding that the deposition continue. Ms. Beck said it was urgent — she needed to pump breast milk for her 3-month-old daughter, and she took the pump out to make her point.

Mr. Trump erupted.

“You’re disgusting,” he told Ms. Beck, in a remark that is not disputed by either side. He then walked out of the room, ending the testimony for the day.

Beck appeared on this morning’s edition of CNN’s “New Day” where she described Trump saying, “You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting, and he ran out of there.”

“It makes you wonder what kind of a presidential candidate who can’t even handle a legal proceeding, a deposition that involves a breast pump…what kind of a leader of the United States would that be?”

3. Trump would “love” to have Sarah Palin in his administration.

Trump sat for an interview on the Palin Update, a radio show for Palin aficionados, where he agreed with the idea of the one-time Republican vice presidential nominee entering the White House as part of a Trump cabinet. “I’d love that,” Trump said. “Because she really is somebody who knows what’s happening and she’s a special person, she’s really a special person and I think people know that.”

4. Trump locked out of Koch empire.

Politico takes a look at how Trump, whose appeal is largely based on his independent financial wealth and claims he can eschew influence peddlers, has no access to perhaps the largest group working on behalf of Republicans in 2016:

The Koch network — a coalition of individual donors and independent groups and companies — intends to spend a whopping $889 million in the run-up to 2016, and is not obliged to stay neutral. While it appears increasingly unlikely that it will officially endorse a GOP primary candidate, it has nonetheless shaped the process by determining which candidates are granted access to i360’s data and the grass-roots activists convened regularly by groups including AFP and Concerned Veterans for America.

A spokesman for i360 declined to comment on why the company, considered the leading supplier of voter data and analytics on the right, refused to provide services to Trump’s campaign. An AFP official said the group doesn’t discuss its event invitations and announces only confirmed speakers. The Koch-backed Latino-voter-targeting outfit LIBRE Initiative was more direct, explaining it has not invited Trump to any of its events and has no plans to do so. A spokesperson pointed to a statement from the group’s president denouncing Trump for his inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants and called him out as an inconsistent conservative “who has gotten ahead through sensationalism.”

5. Mark Cuban says Trump is a gamechanger because he is a blowhard.

Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lavished Trump with loads of praise yesterday in a post on his confidential messaging app, Cyber Dust. “I don’t care what his actual positions are,” Cuban said of his fellow former reality TV star. “I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years." He continued:

Up until Trump announced his candidacy the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run. You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words, smart people who didn’t live perfect lives could never run. Smart people who didn’t want their families put under the media spotlight wouldn’t run. The Donald is changing all of that. He has changed the game and for that he deserves a lot of credit.

Now maybe we will accept candidates warts and all and look at what they can do rather than what headlines they create … Congrats Donald.

New details on a court deposition paint the Donald in a predictably unflattering light.

The media storm surrounding Donald Trump rolls on as Trump solidifies his frontrunner status and roars toward the first Republican debates unscathed by controversy or his GOP opponents.

Call him the Teflon Don, here are the latest developments in the Trump Show.

1. Trump defends Huckabee’s “oven” Holocaust comparison.

Mike Huckabee has repeatedly refused to apologize for his comment blasting the Iranian nuclear deal in which he claimed the deal allows President Obama to “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Trump thinks that’s just alright.

“I think he’s a very good guy, Huckabee, by the way, and I’m really OK with it,” Trump told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “Some people are saying, ‘Oh, the tone,’ and I saw Jeb Bush, who I also think is a nice person, but it’s not about tone. I mean, they’re chopping off Christians’ heads in Syria and lots of other places and we’re worried about tone. I think what Mike has done is he has hit a nerve and he’s made people think a little bit.”

2. Trump once yelled at breast-pumping woman, “You’re disgusting.”

As Republican primary voters insist on treating Trump as a serious presidential contender, media outlets appear obliged to follow suit and The Donald’s public history has come under increased scrutiny. The latest revelation comes via the New York Times that reports on a lawyer who claims Trump once yelled at her and called her “disgusting” after she tried to take a break to pump breast milk during a deposition for a lawsuit:

When the lawyer, Elizabeth Beck, asked for a medical break, Mr. Trump and his lawyers objected, demanding that the deposition continue. Ms. Beck said it was urgent — she needed to pump breast milk for her 3-month-old daughter, and she took the pump out to make her point.

Mr. Trump erupted.

“You’re disgusting,” he told Ms. Beck, in a remark that is not disputed by either side. He then walked out of the room, ending the testimony for the day.

Beck appeared on this morning’s edition of CNN’s “New Day” where she described Trump saying, “You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting, and he ran out of there.”

“It makes you wonder what kind of a presidential candidate who can’t even handle a legal proceeding, a deposition that involves a breast pump…what kind of a leader of the United States would that be?”

3. Trump would “love” to have Sarah Palin in his administration.

Trump sat for an interview on the Palin Update, a radio show for Palin aficionados, where he agreed with the idea of the one-time Republican vice presidential nominee entering the White House as part of a Trump cabinet. “I’d love that,” Trump said. “Because she really is somebody who knows what’s happening and she’s a special person, she’s really a special person and I think people know that.”

4. Trump locked out of Koch empire.

Politico takes a look at how Trump, whose appeal is largely based on his independent financial wealth and claims he can eschew influence peddlers, has no access to perhaps the largest group working on behalf of Republicans in 2016:

The Koch network — a coalition of individual donors and independent groups and companies — intends to spend a whopping $889 million in the run-up to 2016, and is not obliged to stay neutral. While it appears increasingly unlikely that it will officially endorse a GOP primary candidate, it has nonetheless shaped the process by determining which candidates are granted access to i360’s data and the grass-roots activists convened regularly by groups including AFP and Concerned Veterans for America.

A spokesman for i360 declined to comment on why the company, considered the leading supplier of voter data and analytics on the right, refused to provide services to Trump’s campaign. An AFP official said the group doesn’t discuss its event invitations and announces only confirmed speakers. The Koch-backed Latino-voter-targeting outfit LIBRE Initiative was more direct, explaining it has not invited Trump to any of its events and has no plans to do so. A spokesperson pointed to a statement from the group’s president denouncing Trump for his inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants and called him out as an inconsistent conservative “who has gotten ahead through sensationalism.”

5. Mark Cuban says Trump is a gamechanger because he is a blowhard.

Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lavished Trump with loads of praise yesterday in a post on his confidential messaging app, Cyber Dust. “I don’t care what his actual positions are,” Cuban said of his fellow former reality TV star. “I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years." He continued:

Up until Trump announced his candidacy the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run. You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words, smart people who didn’t live perfect lives could never run. Smart people who didn’t want their families put under the media spotlight wouldn’t run. The Donald is changing all of that. He has changed the game and for that he deserves a lot of credit.

Now maybe we will accept candidates warts and all and look at what they can do rather than what headlines they create … Congrats Donald.

Clinton’s first climate change policy pitch – for renewables to provide 33% of the nation’s electricity by 2027 – is bold, but the U.S. must look beyond solar for a clean energy revolution.

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton took a first swing at the many-headed carbon hydra. By the end of her first term, she said, the U.S. would have seven times more solar energy capacity than it does today. And by 2027, renewable energy would supply a third of the nation’s electricity.

Clinton’s announcement, which the campaign said would be the first of many on climate change from the presidential hopeful, extends the carbon-saving ambition in a significant sector of the economy. Burning fossil fuels for electricity accounts for 31 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

One estimate found Clinton’s 33 percent renewable target could slice another 4 percent off the U.S.’s existing pledge to cut emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Americas chief, Ethan Zindler, said the ambition was high, but within reach. “It appears to be on the upper end but it’s entirely doable given the rapidly improving economics of renewables generally and solar particularly.”

The momentum is already swinging towards low carbon electricity. Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, due for activation in August, is predicted to push the renewable sector from its current 13 percent share of the electricity market to 25 percent by 2027.

In 2015, solar photovoltaic installations are forecast to rise by 27 percent, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). This rise has been aided by the soon-to-expire solar investment tax credit (ITC), which the industry said Clinton will have to revive.

“Clinton’s ambitious goal for solar is only possible if solar continues its impressive trajectory. SEIA is working to extend the solar ITC and remove statewide barriers that inhibit the growth of solar,” said SEIA president and CEO, Rhone Resch.

The rise of solar under Clinton’s climate plan and previous policies. (image: Hillary for America)

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Clinton noted that further federal investment would be needed to incentivize the sector’s push to 33 percent. In a fact sheet, the campaign flagged the resuscitation of tax credits and some innovation and regulatory incentives.

“That [the return of tax credits] is hardly a sure thing, given that at least one chamber of Congress will inevitably be Republican controlled during at least the first two years of any new president’s term,” said Zindler.

Jürgen Weiss, head of climate change at the Brattle Group consultancy, said incentives were important as the industry remained relatively tiny, with low public awareness. A large percentage of costs for installers of residential solar are wrapped up in selling the technology to a skeptical public who have relatively low electricity costs and little concern for climate change.

“The big part is convincing people to sign up in the first place. People in the US may care less about climate change than they do about cost,” he said.

Although the technology, regulatory and labour costs are roughly similar, the price of installing residential solar in Germany (where high electricity costs, strong public acceptance and large government incentives have driven a huge push to solar) is around $1.50 (£1) per watt cheaper than in the U.S. Even if half of Clinton’s target of 140GW of solar by 2021 were to come from residential (as opposed to utility) solar panels, that equates to a cost difference of more than $100 billion, mostly spent on advertising and sales.

John Reilly, an energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the targets would be a challenge “in terms of providing incentives to build that much”.

Weiss said: “I do think those costs will come down as the market matures and people get more informed.” The danger, he said, was providing too much tax-payer funded incentive early on. In Germany and the U.K., the solar industry has come under political pressure for being too successful when subsidies were high and now suffers from accusations of being a ‘subsidy junky’.

It’s important to clear up some ambiguity in the Clinton rhetoric. From her renewables campaign video, “a 10-year goal of generating enough renewable energy to power every single home in America” does not mean every home is going to have its own clean energy supply. The residential sector uses roughly a third of the total electricity generated. So a 33 percent renewable goal means the country will be generating this much clean energy, but not all of it will end up in homes.

But factories and office buildings don’t vote and the promise, as my colleague Suzanne Goldenberg points out, allows Clinton to sound like she’s liberating bill payers from utilities. It is also clear that Clinton’s focus on solar (as opposed to wind) is aimed at the voting bill payer. Solar even garners support among some Republicans because of the freedom it offers from regulation and bills.

But the other side of the clean power revolution might be justified in feeling a little left out by Clinton’s policy announcement. Wind energy is by far the big brother to solar. In 2014, wind generated 4.4% of the country’s electricity compared with 0.4% from the sun. In Iowa, where Clinton made her announcement, wind’s share is more than a quarter. It’s cheaper than solar, although the gap is narrowing, and the nation’s first offshore wind farm began construction on Monday.

“Recent cost declines have made wind energy the lowest-cost zero carbon solution, and one of the lowest cost generation options overall. As a result ... wind will account for the majority of all generation additions going forward,” said the American Wind Energy Association’s Rob Gramlich.

The Department of Energy has found that wind energy can affordably reach 20 percent of electricity generation by 2030. And, under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts it will be the biggest contributor of new renewable capacity throughout the 2020s.

As part of her announcement, Clinton pledged to uphold the Obama administration’s heavily-opposed restrictions on the carbon emissions of power stations, which are expected to accelerate the already rapid shut-down of coal plants across the country. This capacity will mostly be taken up by cheap gas, but there will be space for renewables if they can compete.

Alex Trembath, a senior analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, said: “Action on carbon emissions will largely come by making clean energy cheap, as opposed to making dirty energy more expensive, for a variety of reasons.”

The boost to renewables raises important questions about the ability of the grid, which is built to carry power from continuously-burning large power stations rather than millions of diffuse and variable solar panels, to handle such high levels of variable electricity supply.

Reilly said the 33 percent target was achievable. “If we did build that much, then in terms of the grid we would likely have a lot of spare capacity sitting around, so it would be possible to balance it out. The challenge as time goes by and that capacity retires is whether the back-up capacity is actually built,” he said.

But Weiss said the likely reality of a renewables explosion would not be uniform: “Average 33 percent across the country is a different story from having a 70% renewable share in some places and a 10 percent renewable share someplace else.”

Going beyond 33 percent is when things get really tough for the grid.

A study Reilly authored in 2012 estimated that reaching 80% renewable generation would add around 40 percent to the cost of electricity.

Jesse Jenkins and Trembath recently suggested that reaching levels of variable renewables above their ‘capacity factor’ becomes increasingly expensive. Capacity factor is the amount of time your source actually spends generating electricity - for wind 25-35 percent and solar 10-20 precent. So going above a third of the market is where the heavy lifting really begins.

This would ramp up the costs of preparing the grid for new types of generation, which the Clinton campaign flagged as a spending priority. Weiss estimated this could cost in the range of $100 billion over the next 10-15 years, roughly a 5-10 percent increase on current electricity spending.

“My main issue with her target is that it is narrowly constrained to solar,” said Trembath. “The biggest omission I continue to see from Democrats is support for nuclear power, which needs federal support in different ways than most renewable energy technologies do.” In total, Clinton’s pledge will push the zero carbon electricity sector (including nuclear) from 32 percent today, to about 50 percent in 2027.

Any credible economy-wide climate scheme will need to encompass a great swathe of measures to reduce carbon, said Zindler.

“There are other means for lowering CO2 emissions in the U.S. Our comparatively profligate use of gasoline has been one area of focus and average consumer vehicle fuel efficiency has actually been rising in the US in recent years. More improvements in transport are definitely possible, particularly in the area of trucks. More efficient use of electricity in homes and businesses is also an area that clearly offers opportunities that do not even necessarily need to be policy driven as they offer consumers the opportunity to save money,” he said.

Environmentalists were also quick to point out that Clinton was still skirting the big federal policy questions on support for the fossil fuel industry - the Arctic and Keystone XL pipeline.

Can Clinton be a climate Heracles “taking on the global threat of climate change”? It’s a start and the rhetoric is certainly bold. But this amounts to a partial decapitation of one head. It will take many more swings to kill the beast.

Clinton’s first climate change policy pitch – for renewables to provide 33% of the nation’s electricity by 2027 – is bold, but the U.S. must look beyond solar for a clean energy revolution.

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton took a first swing at the many-headed carbon hydra. By the end of her first term, she said, the U.S. would have seven times more solar energy capacity than it does today. And by 2027, renewable energy would supply a third of the nation’s electricity.

Clinton’s announcement, which the campaign said would be the first of many on climate change from the presidential hopeful, extends the carbon-saving ambition in a significant sector of the economy. Burning fossil fuels for electricity accounts for 31 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

One estimate found Clinton’s 33 percent renewable target could slice another 4 percent off the U.S.’s existing pledge to cut emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Americas chief, Ethan Zindler, said the ambition was high, but within reach. “It appears to be on the upper end but it’s entirely doable given the rapidly improving economics of renewables generally and solar particularly.”

The momentum is already swinging towards low carbon electricity. Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, due for activation in August, is predicted to push the renewable sector from its current 13 percent share of the electricity market to 25 percent by 2027.

In 2015, solar photovoltaic installations are forecast to rise by 27 percent, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). This rise has been aided by the soon-to-expire solar investment tax credit (ITC), which the industry said Clinton will have to revive.

“Clinton’s ambitious goal for solar is only possible if solar continues its impressive trajectory. SEIA is working to extend the solar ITC and remove statewide barriers that inhibit the growth of solar,” said SEIA president and CEO, Rhone Resch.

The rise of solar under Clinton’s climate plan and previous policies. (image: Hillary for America)

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Clinton noted that further federal investment would be needed to incentivize the sector’s push to 33 percent. In a fact sheet, the campaign flagged the resuscitation of tax credits and some innovation and regulatory incentives.

“That [the return of tax credits] is hardly a sure thing, given that at least one chamber of Congress will inevitably be Republican controlled during at least the first two years of any new president’s term,” said Zindler.

Jürgen Weiss, head of climate change at the Brattle Group consultancy, said incentives were important as the industry remained relatively tiny, with low public awareness. A large percentage of costs for installers of residential solar are wrapped up in selling the technology to a skeptical public who have relatively low electricity costs and little concern for climate change.

“The big part is convincing people to sign up in the first place. People in the US may care less about climate change than they do about cost,” he said.

Although the technology, regulatory and labour costs are roughly similar, the price of installing residential solar in Germany (where high electricity costs, strong public acceptance and large government incentives have driven a huge push to solar) is around $1.50 (£1) per watt cheaper than in the U.S. Even if half of Clinton’s target of 140GW of solar by 2021 were to come from residential (as opposed to utility) solar panels, that equates to a cost difference of more than $100 billion, mostly spent on advertising and sales.

John Reilly, an energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the targets would be a challenge “in terms of providing incentives to build that much”.

Weiss said: “I do think those costs will come down as the market matures and people get more informed.” The danger, he said, was providing too much tax-payer funded incentive early on. In Germany and the U.K., the solar industry has come under political pressure for being too successful when subsidies were high and now suffers from accusations of being a ‘subsidy junky’.

It’s important to clear up some ambiguity in the Clinton rhetoric. From her renewables campaign video, “a 10-year goal of generating enough renewable energy to power every single home in America” does not mean every home is going to have its own clean energy supply. The residential sector uses roughly a third of the total electricity generated. So a 33 percent renewable goal means the country will be generating this much clean energy, but not all of it will end up in homes.

But factories and office buildings don’t vote and the promise, as my colleague Suzanne Goldenberg points out, allows Clinton to sound like she’s liberating bill payers from utilities. It is also clear that Clinton’s focus on solar (as opposed to wind) is aimed at the voting bill payer. Solar even garners support among some Republicans because of the freedom it offers from regulation and bills.

But the other side of the clean power revolution might be justified in feeling a little left out by Clinton’s policy announcement. Wind energy is by far the big brother to solar. In 2014, wind generated 4.4% of the country’s electricity compared with 0.4% from the sun. In Iowa, where Clinton made her announcement, wind’s share is more than a quarter. It’s cheaper than solar, although the gap is narrowing, and the nation’s first offshore wind farm began construction on Monday.

“Recent cost declines have made wind energy the lowest-cost zero carbon solution, and one of the lowest cost generation options overall. As a result ... wind will account for the majority of all generation additions going forward,” said the American Wind Energy Association’s Rob Gramlich.

The Department of Energy has found that wind energy can affordably reach 20 percent of electricity generation by 2030. And, under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts it will be the biggest contributor of new renewable capacity throughout the 2020s.

As part of her announcement, Clinton pledged to uphold the Obama administration’s heavily-opposed restrictions on the carbon emissions of power stations, which are expected to accelerate the already rapid shut-down of coal plants across the country. This capacity will mostly be taken up by cheap gas, but there will be space for renewables if they can compete.

Alex Trembath, a senior analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, said: “Action on carbon emissions will largely come by making clean energy cheap, as opposed to making dirty energy more expensive, for a variety of reasons.”

The boost to renewables raises important questions about the ability of the grid, which is built to carry power from continuously-burning large power stations rather than millions of diffuse and variable solar panels, to handle such high levels of variable electricity supply.

Reilly said the 33 percent target was achievable. “If we did build that much, then in terms of the grid we would likely have a lot of spare capacity sitting around, so it would be possible to balance it out. The challenge as time goes by and that capacity retires is whether the back-up capacity is actually built,” he said.

But Weiss said the likely reality of a renewables explosion would not be uniform: “Average 33 percent across the country is a different story from having a 70% renewable share in some places and a 10 percent renewable share someplace else.”

Going beyond 33 percent is when things get really tough for the grid.

A study Reilly authored in 2012 estimated that reaching 80% renewable generation would add around 40 percent to the cost of electricity.

Jesse Jenkins and Trembath recently suggested that reaching levels of variable renewables above their ‘capacity factor’ becomes increasingly expensive. Capacity factor is the amount of time your source actually spends generating electricity - for wind 25-35 percent and solar 10-20 precent. So going above a third of the market is where the heavy lifting really begins.

This would ramp up the costs of preparing the grid for new types of generation, which the Clinton campaign flagged as a spending priority. Weiss estimated this could cost in the range of $100 billion over the next 10-15 years, roughly a 5-10 percent increase on current electricity spending.

“My main issue with her target is that it is narrowly constrained to solar,” said Trembath. “The biggest omission I continue to see from Democrats is support for nuclear power, which needs federal support in different ways than most renewable energy technologies do.” In total, Clinton’s pledge will push the zero carbon electricity sector (including nuclear) from 32 percent today, to about 50 percent in 2027.

Any credible economy-wide climate scheme will need to encompass a great swathe of measures to reduce carbon, said Zindler.

“There are other means for lowering CO2 emissions in the U.S. Our comparatively profligate use of gasoline has been one area of focus and average consumer vehicle fuel efficiency has actually been rising in the US in recent years. More improvements in transport are definitely possible, particularly in the area of trucks. More efficient use of electricity in homes and businesses is also an area that clearly offers opportunities that do not even necessarily need to be policy driven as they offer consumers the opportunity to save money,” he said.

Environmentalists were also quick to point out that Clinton was still skirting the big federal policy questions on support for the fossil fuel industry - the Arctic and Keystone XL pipeline.

Can Clinton be a climate Heracles “taking on the global threat of climate change”? It’s a start and the rhetoric is certainly bold. But this amounts to a partial decapitation of one head. It will take many more swings to kill the beast.

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-great-response-racism-and-inequalityBernie Sanders' Great Response on Racism and Inequalityhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/104015942/0/alternet_election2012~Bernie-Sanders-Great-Response-on-Racism-and-Inequality

He linked police violence against individuals to “the violence of economic deprivation” visited upon the same communities of color.

If Sanders responded badly to demands of the Black Lives Matter activists, almost immediately afterward he showed an understanding of and willingness to address their concerns with the same forcefulness he brings to populist economic issues. After Phoenix, Sander was the first candidate to speak out against the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died in police custody in Waller County, Texas, earlier this month. In a statement released last Tuesday, Sanders denounced the “totally outrageous police behavior” recorded in the video of Bland’s arrest, and cited it as evidence of “why we need real police reform.”

His speech to the SCLC showed that Sanders not only heard the message of Black Lives Matter, but took it to heart, and is making it central to his campaign. Indeed Sanders could have been speaking directly to the Black Lives Matter movement when he praised SCLC for understanding, “that real change takes place when millions of people stand up and say ‘enough is enough,’ and when we create a political revolution from the ground up.” Saying, “enough is enough,” and “creating a political revolution from the ground up” is what Black Lives Matter activists are doing.

Rather than dwell on his past civil rights work, which many in the room likely already knew, Sanders turned to “the need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else — especially the African-American community and working-class whites — are becoming poorer.”

After running through a litany of statistics on racial disparity, Sanders addressed the intertwined realities of structural racism and economic inequality in stronger terms than any 2016 presidential candidate to date.

Too many African-Americans today are simultaneously having to deal the crisis of racial justice while coping with the effects of poverty and economic deprivation, such as drugs, crime, and despair.

… As Martin Luther King, Jr., said; Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Across the nation, too many African-Americans and other minorities find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes like criminals. A growing number of communities do not trust the police and police have become disconnected from the communities they are sworn to protect.

Sanders linked police violence against individuals to “the violence of economic deprivation” visited upon the same communities of color where police violence is all to common. “Communities of color also face the violence of economic deprivation. Let’s be frank: neighborhoods like those in west Baltimore, where Freddie Gray resided, suffer the most.”

In a society of increasing diversity, ending systemic racial disparities is vital to building economic prosperity. This begins with comprehensive immigration reform, expanded voting rights and an end to mass incarceration and the systematic criminalization of people of color.

Going forward, progressive candidates and elected officials will be challenged to place the elimination of structural racism at the center of their campaigns and agendas. Progressive organizations and movements must embrace the challenge of making sure candidates and leaders prioritize both structural racism and economic inequality. Sander’s speech to the SCLC, and his relatively fast self-correction following Netroots Nation, show what can happen when both progressive movements and candidates rise to those challenges.

If Sanders responded badly to demands of the Black Lives Matter activists, almost immediately afterward he showed an understanding of and willingness to address their concerns with the same forcefulness he brings to populist economic issues. After Phoenix, Sander was the first candidate to speak out against the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died in police custody in Waller County, Texas, earlier this month. In a statement released last Tuesday, Sanders denounced the “totally outrageous police behavior” recorded in the video of Bland’s arrest, and cited it as evidence of “why we need real police reform.”

His speech to the SCLC showed that Sanders not only heard the message of Black Lives Matter, but took it to heart, and is making it central to his campaign. Indeed Sanders could have been speaking directly to the Black Lives Matter movement when he praised SCLC for understanding, “that real change takes place when millions of people stand up and say ‘enough is enough,’ and when we create a political revolution from the ground up.” Saying, “enough is enough,” and “creating a political revolution from the ground up” is what Black Lives Matter activists are doing.

Rather than dwell on his past civil rights work, which many in the room likely already knew, Sanders turned to “the need to simultaneously address the structural and institutional racism which exists in this country, while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else — especially the African-American community and working-class whites — are becoming poorer.”

After running through a litany of statistics on racial disparity, Sanders addressed the intertwined realities of structural racism and economic inequality in stronger terms than any 2016 presidential candidate to date.

Too many African-Americans today are simultaneously having to deal the crisis of racial justice while coping with the effects of poverty and economic deprivation, such as drugs, crime, and despair.

… As Martin Luther King, Jr., said; Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Across the nation, too many African-Americans and other minorities find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes like criminals. A growing number of communities do not trust the police and police have become disconnected from the communities they are sworn to protect.

Sanders linked police violence against individuals to “the violence of economic deprivation” visited upon the same communities of color where police violence is all to common. “Communities of color also face the violence of economic deprivation. Let’s be frank: neighborhoods like those in west Baltimore, where Freddie Gray resided, suffer the most.”

In a society of increasing diversity, ending systemic racial disparities is vital to building economic prosperity. This begins with comprehensive immigration reform, expanded voting rights and an end to mass incarceration and the systematic criminalization of people of color.

Going forward, progressive candidates and elected officials will be challenged to place the elimination of structural racism at the center of their campaigns and agendas. Progressive organizations and movements must embrace the challenge of making sure candidates and leaders prioritize both structural racism and economic inequality. Sander’s speech to the SCLC, and his relatively fast self-correction following Netroots Nation, show what can happen when both progressive movements and candidates rise to those challenges.

Never have so many done so much to reveal so little than in the collected journalism about presidential nomination contests. The personality-driven trivia. The hokey generalizations. The bogs of conventional wisdom. The day-by-day scorekeeping that ends up worse than uninformative; it is anti-informative. (Just ask Presidents George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, John Connally, Richard Gephardt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.) The utter failure to inform the public of the actual, on-the-ground dynamics of the nuts-and-bolts process by which the parties chose their standard-bearers, and the larger dynamics that drive party trends from decade to decade.

And, last but not least, the shameful lack of any useful contribution to a richer public understanding of what any of this means for the future of the republic at large. Consider, to take an example close to hand, the saga of the $80,000 boat.

On June 9, The New York Times ran a useful, detailed consideration of the finances of Marco Rubio. Publicly, the Florida senator describes his everyman’s struggle to “finally pay off his law school loans.” Privately, according to state records unearthed by the paper’s Steve Eder and Michael Barbaro, he spent “$80,000 for a luxury speedboat.”

The detail revealed a larger pattern: Rubio has been financially in the hole for nearly his entire adult life. The reason this mattered, noted the Times—whose work on Rubio has been a welcome exception to the rule of bad campaign reporting—was that it “has made him unusually reliant on a campaign donor, Norman Braman, a billionaire who has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s job as a college instructor, hired him as a lawyer, and continues to employ his wife.”

These details were explained in the Times a month earlier. The same two reporters described the 82-year-old Braman, an almost comically plutocratic figure who sells Rolls Royces and Bugattis for a living, and almost single-handedly recalled Miami’s mayor. Braman, who implored the Times reporters, “I don’t consider myself a fat cat. Don’t make me out to be a fat cat,” has been able to call the tune for the 44-year-old Rubio.

Then came Politico’s bubble-headed media reporter Dylan Byers with a scoop: Rubio’s “luxury speedboat” was “in fact, an offshore fishing boat.” Speedboats, you see, are for rich swells; fishing boats, even ones costing almost $100,000, are for jes’ folks.

Immediately, this supposed error became the shiny bouncing ball the political media decided to chase.

Politico covered Boatgate eight times over the next two weeks—Byers twice in two consecutive days. They didn’t mention Braman once. (They had mentioned him in May—in scorekeeping mode, as the “Miami auto dealer who’s expected to pour anywhere from $10 million to $25 million into [Rubio’s] bid.”) The Washington Post also featured little but nautically-inclined reporting on Rubio in that same period, seven pieces mentioning the boat including one fact-checking Jon Stewart and another headlined “Mr. Rubio, Like a Lot of Americans, Is Terrible With Money.” (Not, say, “Mr. Rubio, Like a Lot of Americans, Has a Surrogate Father Who Loans Him Rides on His Private Jet.”) The neocons at The Weekly Standard summed things up for the historical record: the Times’s “failed hit on Marco Rubio’s fishing boat” proved “Rubio is [the] GOP frontrunner.” End of story.

What else do you need to know about Marco Rubio in the second week of June 2015?

Political Science Fail

Political scientists, in their earnest, empirical way, don’t offer much more illumination. The most influential effort is The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Its coauthors John Zaller, Marty Cohen, Hans Noel, and David Karol have been frequently quoted on the subject. Unfortunately much of what they have to offer is banal.

“Candidates without party support have never won,” Zaller told The New York Times’ Nate Cohn—a water-is-wet sort of insight, and question-begging at that: what about Barry Goldwater, who had so much party “support” that hardly any Republican officeholders campaigned for him in 1964, or George McGovern in 1972, against whom major party figures and factions conspired in the general election?

What this all suggests is that the state-of-the-art statistical mojo conjured over 416 pages by four of the most respected scholars in the field amounts to very little when it comes to predicting who gets nominations and why.

Statisticians routinely warn of what they describe as the “small N” problem: unless there is enough data to work with, it’s all but impossible to make statistically valid conclusions.

There have been precisely 10 presidential election cycles in the modern period that began with the two parties reforming their nominating systems after 1968, to favor primaries and caucuses open to party rank and file instead of backroom brokering by party elites. That’s not enough data to come up with useful, statistically verifiable conclusions that can be expected to endure—such as the old saw about presidential nominations that “Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.”That is to say that Dems have ended up choosing sexy outliers who emerge as if from nowhere: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. Republicans, more authoritarian in mien, tab the second place finisher in the previous contested race, or venerable warhorses, or presidents’ sons.

Today, this pattern appears to be an artifact of a bygone age. As of this writing there are 15 declared candidates. Early polling had Donald Trump in the lead, and not even a stable top tier, as revealed by polling, donations, endorsements, or any other metric you can think of.

Conned by Cohn

So all is chaos? Nate Cohn, venturing one of his trademark analyses that cut through an apparent morass of complexity to reveal the truth hidden within, says not: He argued in April that the Republicans were well on their way to sorting themselves out into a traditional two-way race, a front-runner (either Bush, Walker, or possibly Rubio) and a rotating cast of colorful second-place flavors of the month, like in 2012. (Pop quiz: who was Herman Cain?) Cohn sorted the Republicans into three buckets, adducing historical antecedents for each. He claimed his argument reveals “underlying fundamentals” that “determine from the very start which candidate will win the nomination.”

He slips upon banana peel after banana peel in the attempt. His first bucket is “Invisible Primary Leaders”—whom he claims almost always win. He cites the Mitt Romneys, the GWB’s, the Al Gores, Walter Mondales—reasonable enough. But he also includes Ronald Reagan, which is nonsense. Running up to 1980, Reagan was the serious candidate least respected by “invisible primary” gatekeeping elites. Their darlings were Howard Baker, George Bush, and, most prominently, “Big John” Connally—who spent $11 million in 1980 to win a single delegate.

“No factor has proved more important to a candidate’s chances than the loyalty of party elites.” Not hardly. Cohn’s article only makes it seem so by excluding such elites of elite darlings as Scoop Jackson in 1976, Humphrey and Muskie in 1972, George Romney in 1968—and I could go on. He goes on to torture the data in such a way that 89 percent of those he lists as “Invisible Primary Winners” went on to become nominees. In my own tally of same, however, the number is more like 45 percent.

I could explore his argument further, but a third of the way through his article, Cohn’s whole foundation has so badly broken down, it hardly matters.

So what indicators should a well-informed citizen be following? Not polls. At this point in 2012 Mitt Romney was running behindRudy Giuliani, with Sarah Palin close behind. Not even, really, the winners of elections. Who won that year’s Iowa caucus? Rick Santorum. He then carried 10 more states. It ended up not mattering. Republican nominations are not simple plebiscites; the process is much more occult than that.

Don’t pay overmuch attention to the braying loudmouths of the activist right either, as they flay Marco Rubio as a handmaiden of the Mexican hordes for daring to express compassion for immigrants; Ohio Governor John Kasich for herding the poor onto the federal plantation by accepting Obamacare’s Medicaid subsidies; Jeb Bush for welcoming brainwashing federal bureaucrats into Florida elementary schools.

Remember they flayed John McCain even worse. Talk-radio host Michael Reagan first noted the “huge gap that separates McCain,” who “has contempt for conservatives who he thinks we can be duped into thinking he’s one of them,” from “my dad, Ronald Reagan.” Eight days later Michael Reagan reconsidered and said “you can bet my father would be itching to get out on the campaign trail working to elect him.”

Authoritarians follow signals from above. Which won’t keep the puppies of the press corps from dwelling on which candidate the angry Tea Party bleaters are calling “unacceptable” this week, even though that really doesn’t matter.

What about endorsements? For one thing, you’ll have to scour the news to find them. Carly Fiorina may have won the undying devotion of Gene G. Chandler, deputy speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. And have you heard Mike Huckabee has nabbed not just the lieutenant governor of Arkansas, but her secretary of state and state treasurer? But news like that is not particularly useful if you’re a producer or editor hungry for titillated eyeballs. And perhaps that’s for the best. The name of today’s game is TV commercials, not endorsements, door-knocking armies, and “walking around money.” TV is costly and it takes don’t-call-me-fat-cats like Norman Braman, Sheldon Adelson, and the Brothers Koch to pay those kinds of bills.

The Plutocrats’ Right to Choose

The bottom line is that the penumbras and emanations of Citizens United are changing the campaign game in ways that throw all previous understandings of how Republicans nominate presidents into a cocked hat. To see how it’s working on the ground, come with me to Southern California, where last year David and Charles Koch convened one of their dog-and-pony shows, where the aspirants lined up to stand on their hind legs to beg before their would-be masters. Politico spoke to two people who were there, and offered the following account of the performance of Ohio’s Governor John Kasich.

“Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d said it was ‘what God wanted.’” Kasich’s “fiery” response: “I don’t know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have to answer what I’ve done for the poor.”

Other years, before other audiences, such public piety might have sounded banal. This year, it’s enough to kill a candidacy:

“About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar.”

Which is, of course, astonishing. But even more astonishing was the lesson the Politico drew from it—one, naturally, about personalities: “Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealth benefactors.” His temper. Not their temper. Not, say, “Kasich’s refusal to kowtow before the petulant whims of a couple of dozen greedy nonentities who despise the Gospel of Jesus Christ has foreclosed his access to the backroom cabals without which a Republican presidential candidacy is inconceivable.”

All this noise doesn’t amount to a story by which citizens can understand what is going on. Not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.

To see how consequential the handing over of this kind of power to nonentities like these is, consider the candidates’ liabilities with another constituency once considered relevant in presidential campaigns: voters. Chris Christie’s home state approval rating, alongside his opening of a nearly billion-dollar hole in New Jersey’s budget, is 35 percent. While Christie has only flirted with federal law enforcement, Rick Perry has been indicted. Scott Walker’s approval rating among the people who know him best (besides David Koch) is 41 percent, and only 40 percent of Wisconsinites believe the state is heading in the right direction. Bobby Jindal’s latest approval rating in the Pelican State is 27 percent. Senator Lindsey Graham announced his presidency by all but promising he’d take the country to war; Jeb Bush by telling Americans they need to work more. Rick Santorum not so long ago made political history: he lost his Senate seat by 19 points, an unprecedented feat for a two-term incumbent.

That political facts this blunt are no longer disqualifying for presidential candidates is a sort of revolution. If the winnowing of front-runners from also-rans has traditionally been a financial process (when the money dries up, so do the campaigns) Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas and Macau began tearing up that paradigm in 2012 by shoveling money to Newt Gingrich; $20 million total, including $5 million dispensed on March 23, three days after Gingrich won 8 percent in Illinois’s primary to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, keeping Gingrich officially in the race more than a week after the RNC declaredRomney the presumptive nominee.

Now, four previously unheard of super-PACS supporting Ted Cruz, who has no support among the GOP’s “establishment,” raised $31 million “with virtually no warning over the course of several days beginning Monday.” The New York Times reported this shortly after reporting that “[t]he leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reigning in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.”

And all this, admittedly, gets reported, in bits and pieces. But all this noise doesn’t amount to an ongoing story by which citizens can understand what is actually going on. Not just concerning who might be our next president, but what it all means for the republic. And not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names, really, should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.

Instead, we get the same old hackneyed horse race—like, did you know that Rick Santorum is in trouble? Only one voter showed up at his June 8 event in Hamlin, Iowa. The Des Moines Registerreported that. Politicomade sure that tout Washington knew it. Though neither mentioned that Santorum is still doing just fine with the one voter the matters: Foster Friess, the Wyoming financier who gave his super-PAC $6.7 million in 2012, and promises something similar this year. “He has the best chance of winning,” Friess said. “I can’t imagine why anybody would not vote for him.’’ Which, considering only 2 percent of New Hampshirites and Iowans agree with him, is kind of crazy. And you’d think having people like that picking the people who govern us would all be rather newsworthy.

Never have so many done so much to reveal so little than in the collected journalism about presidential nomination contests. The personality-driven trivia. The hokey generalizations. The bogs of conventional wisdom. The day-by-day scorekeeping that ends up worse than uninformative; it is anti-informative. (Just ask Presidents George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, John Connally, Richard Gephardt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.) The utter failure to inform the public of the actual, on-the-ground dynamics of the nuts-and-bolts process by which the parties chose their standard-bearers, and the larger dynamics that drive party trends from decade to decade.

And, last but not least, the shameful lack of any useful contribution to a richer public understanding of what any of this means for the future of the republic at large. Consider, to take an example close to hand, the saga of the $80,000 boat.

On June 9, The New York Times ran a useful, detailed consideration of the finances of Marco Rubio. Publicly, the Florida senator describes his everyman’s struggle to “finally pay off his law school loans.” Privately, according to state records unearthed by the paper’s Steve Eder and Michael Barbaro, he spent “$80,000 for a luxury speedboat.”

The detail revealed a larger pattern: Rubio has been financially in the hole for nearly his entire adult life. The reason this mattered, noted the Times—whose work on Rubio has been a welcome exception to the rule of bad campaign reporting—was that it “has made him unusually reliant on a campaign donor, Norman Braman, a billionaire who has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s job as a college instructor, hired him as a lawyer, and continues to employ his wife.”

These details were explained in the Times a month earlier. The same two reporters described the 82-year-old Braman, an almost comically plutocratic figure who sells Rolls Royces and Bugattis for a living, and almost single-handedly recalled Miami’s mayor. Braman, who implored the Times reporters, “I don’t consider myself a fat cat. Don’t make me out to be a fat cat,” has been able to call the tune for the 44-year-old Rubio.

Then came Politico’s bubble-headed media reporter Dylan Byers with a scoop: Rubio’s “luxury speedboat” was “in fact, an offshore fishing boat.” Speedboats, you see, are for rich swells; fishing boats, even ones costing almost $100,000, are for jes’ folks.

Immediately, this supposed error became the shiny bouncing ball the political media decided to chase.

Politico covered Boatgate eight times over the next two weeks—Byers twice in two consecutive days. They didn’t mention Braman once. (They had mentioned him in May—in scorekeeping mode, as the “Miami auto dealer who’s expected to pour anywhere from $10 million to $25 million into [Rubio’s] bid.”) The Washington Post also featured little but nautically-inclined reporting on Rubio in that same period, seven pieces mentioning the boat including one fact-checking Jon Stewart and another headlined “Mr. Rubio, Like a Lot of Americans, Is Terrible With Money.” (Not, say, “Mr. Rubio, Like a Lot of Americans, Has a Surrogate Father Who Loans Him Rides on His Private Jet.”) The neocons at The Weekly Standard summed things up for the historical record: the Times’s “failed hit on Marco Rubio’s fishing boat” proved “Rubio is [the] GOP frontrunner.” End of story.

What else do you need to know about Marco Rubio in the second week of June 2015?

Political Science Fail

Political scientists, in their earnest, empirical way, don’t offer much more illumination. The most influential effort is The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Its coauthors John Zaller, Marty Cohen, Hans Noel, and David Karol have been frequently quoted on the subject. Unfortunately much of what they have to offer is banal.

“Candidates without party support have never won,” Zaller told The New York Times’ Nate Cohn—a water-is-wet sort of insight, and question-begging at that: what about Barry Goldwater, who had so much party “support” that hardly any Republican officeholders campaigned for him in 1964, or George McGovern in 1972, against whom major party figures and factions conspired in the general election?

What this all suggests is that the state-of-the-art statistical mojo conjured over 416 pages by four of the most respected scholars in the field amounts to very little when it comes to predicting who gets nominations and why.

Statisticians routinely warn of what they describe as the “small N” problem: unless there is enough data to work with, it’s all but impossible to make statistically valid conclusions.

There have been precisely 10 presidential election cycles in the modern period that began with the two parties reforming their nominating systems after 1968, to favor primaries and caucuses open to party rank and file instead of backroom brokering by party elites. That’s not enough data to come up with useful, statistically verifiable conclusions that can be expected to endure—such as the old saw about presidential nominations that “Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.”
That is to say that Dems have ended up choosing sexy outliers who emerge as if from nowhere: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. Republicans, more authoritarian in mien, tab the second place finisher in the previous contested race, or venerable warhorses, or presidents’ sons.

Today, this pattern appears to be an artifact of a bygone age. As of this writing there are 15 declared candidates. Early polling had Donald Trump in the lead, and not even a stable top tier, as revealed by polling, donations, endorsements, or any other metric you can think of.

Conned by Cohn

So all is chaos? Nate Cohn, venturing one of his trademark analyses that cut through an apparent morass of complexity to reveal the truth hidden within, says not: He argued in April that the Republicans were well on their way to sorting themselves out into a traditional two-way race, a front-runner (either Bush, Walker, or possibly Rubio) and a rotating cast of colorful second-place flavors of the month, like in 2012. (Pop quiz: who was Herman Cain?) Cohn sorted the Republicans into three buckets, adducing historical antecedents for each. He claimed his argument reveals “underlying fundamentals” that “determine from the very start which candidate will win the nomination.”

He slips upon banana peel after banana peel in the attempt. His first bucket is “Invisible Primary Leaders”—whom he claims almost always win. He cites the Mitt Romneys, the GWB’s, the Al Gores, Walter Mondales—reasonable enough. But he also includes Ronald Reagan, which is nonsense. Running up to 1980, Reagan was the serious candidate least respected by “invisible primary” gatekeeping elites. Their darlings were Howard Baker, George Bush, and, most prominently, “Big John” Connally—who spent $11 million in 1980 to win a single delegate.

“No factor has proved more important to a candidate’s chances than the loyalty of party elites.” Not hardly. Cohn’s article only makes it seem so by excluding such elites of elite darlings as Scoop Jackson in 1976, Humphrey and Muskie in 1972, George Romney in 1968—and I could go on. He goes on to torture the data in such a way that 89 percent of those he lists as “Invisible Primary Winners” went on to become nominees. In my own tally of same, however, the number is more like 45 percent.

I could explore his argument further, but a third of the way through his article, Cohn’s whole foundation has so badly broken down, it hardly matters.

So what indicators should a well-informed citizen be following? Not polls. At this point in 2012 Mitt Romney was running behindRudy Giuliani, with Sarah Palin close behind. Not even, really, the winners of elections. Who won that year’s Iowa caucus? Rick Santorum. He then carried 10 more states. It ended up not mattering. Republican nominations are not simple plebiscites; the process is much more occult than that.

Don’t pay overmuch attention to the braying loudmouths of the activist right either, as they flay Marco Rubio as a handmaiden of the Mexican hordes for daring to express compassion for immigrants; Ohio Governor John Kasich for herding the poor onto the federal plantation by accepting Obamacare’s Medicaid subsidies; Jeb Bush for welcoming brainwashing federal bureaucrats into Florida elementary schools.

Remember they flayed John McCain even worse. Talk-radio host Michael Reagan first noted the “huge gap that separates McCain,” who “has contempt for conservatives who he thinks we can be duped into thinking he’s one of them,” from “my dad, Ronald Reagan.” Eight days later Michael Reagan reconsidered and said “you can bet my father would be itching to get out on the campaign trail working to elect him.”

Authoritarians follow signals from above. Which won’t keep the puppies of the press corps from dwelling on which candidate the angry Tea Party bleaters are calling “unacceptable” this week, even though that really doesn’t matter.

What about endorsements? For one thing, you’ll have to scour the news to find them. Carly Fiorina may have won the undying devotion of Gene G. Chandler, deputy speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. And have you heard Mike Huckabee has nabbed not just the lieutenant governor of Arkansas, but her secretary of state and state treasurer? But news like that is not particularly useful if you’re a producer or editor hungry for titillated eyeballs. And perhaps that’s for the best. The name of today’s game is TV commercials, not endorsements, door-knocking armies, and “walking around money.” TV is costly and it takes don’t-call-me-fat-cats like Norman Braman, Sheldon Adelson, and the Brothers Koch to pay those kinds of bills.

The Plutocrats’ Right to Choose

The bottom line is that the penumbras and emanations of Citizens United are changing the campaign game in ways that throw all previous understandings of how Republicans nominate presidents into a cocked hat. To see how it’s working on the ground, come with me to Southern California, where last year David and Charles Koch convened one of their dog-and-pony shows, where the aspirants lined up to stand on their hind legs to beg before their would-be masters. Politico spoke to two people who were there, and offered the following account of the performance of Ohio’s Governor John Kasich.

“Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d said it was ‘what God wanted.’” Kasich’s “fiery” response: “I don’t know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have to answer what I’ve done for the poor.”

Other years, before other audiences, such public piety might have sounded banal. This year, it’s enough to kill a candidacy:

“About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar.”

Which is, of course, astonishing. But even more astonishing was the lesson the Politico drew from it—one, naturally, about personalities: “Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealth benefactors.” His temper. Not their temper. Not, say, “Kasich’s refusal to kowtow before the petulant whims of a couple of dozen greedy nonentities who despise the Gospel of Jesus Christ has foreclosed his access to the backroom cabals without which a Republican presidential candidacy is inconceivable.”

All this noise doesn’t amount to a story by which citizens can understand what is going on. Not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.

To see how consequential the handing over of this kind of power to nonentities like these is, consider the candidates’ liabilities with another constituency once considered relevant in presidential campaigns: voters. Chris Christie’s home state approval rating, alongside his opening of a nearly billion-dollar hole in New Jersey’s budget, is 35 percent. While Christie has only flirted with federal law enforcement, Rick Perry has been indicted. Scott Walker’s approval rating among the people who know him best (besides David Koch) is 41 percent, and only 40 percent of Wisconsinites believe the state is heading in the right direction. Bobby Jindal’s latest approval rating in the Pelican State is 27 percent. Senator Lindsey Graham announced his presidency by all but promising he’d take the country to war; Jeb Bush by telling Americans they need to work more. Rick Santorum not so long ago made political history: he lost his Senate seat by 19 points, an unprecedented feat for a two-term incumbent.

That political facts this blunt are no longer disqualifying for presidential candidates is a sort of revolution. If the winnowing of front-runners from also-rans has traditionally been a financial process (when the money dries up, so do the campaigns) Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas and Macau began tearing up that paradigm in 2012 by shoveling money to Newt Gingrich; $20 million total, including $5 million dispensed on March 23, three days after Gingrich won 8 percent in Illinois’s primary to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, keeping Gingrich officially in the race more than a week after the RNC declaredRomney the presumptive nominee.

Now, four previously unheard of super-PACS supporting Ted Cruz, who has no support among the GOP’s “establishment,” raised $31 million “with virtually no warning over the course of several days beginning Monday.” The New York Times reported this shortly after reporting that “[t]he leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reigning in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.”

And all this, admittedly, gets reported, in bits and pieces. But all this noise doesn’t amount to an ongoing story by which citizens can understand what is actually going on. Not just concerning who might be our next president, but what it all means for the republic. And not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names, really, should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.

Instead, we get the same old hackneyed horse race—like, did you know that Rick Santorum is in trouble? Only one voter showed up at his June 8 event in Hamlin, Iowa. The Des Moines Registerreported that. Politicomade sure that tout Washington knew it. Though neither mentioned that Santorum is still doing just fine with the one voter the matters: Foster Friess, the Wyoming financier who gave his super-PAC $6.7 million in 2012, and promises something similar this year. “He has the best chance of winning,” Friess said. “I can’t imagine why anybody would not vote for him.’’ Which, considering only 2 percent of New Hampshirites and Iowans agree with him, is kind of crazy. And you’d think having people like that picking the people who govern us would all be rather newsworthy.

You’d be right.

Just don’t expect to read anything about it in Politico.

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http://www.alternet.org/comics/alternet-comics-brian-mcfadden-crazy-things-gop-candidates-do-get-attentionAlterNet Comics: Brian McFadden on the Crazy Things GOP Candidates Do to Get Attentionhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/103741882/0/alternet_election2012~AlterNet-Comics-Brian-McFadden-on-the-Crazy-Things-GOP-Candidates-Do-to-Get-Attention

Money is everything for people like Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina.

Donald Trump says exactly what the GOP believes. It’s a simple axiom: personal wealth accumulation is everything. Republican Party officials believe individuals like The Donald attain riches through their own guts, glory and gumption with not an iota of aid from community, country or, frankly, inherited wealth.

It’s just that when The Donald expresses their credo, he ignores the shinola and emphasizes the crass. Instead of going with the slick 2012 GOP convention theme, “I built that,” to aggrandize individual capitalist conquest, The Donald slammed a group of his primary competitors for serving their nation instead of themselves.

What The Donald failed to acknowledge is that some of them, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, serve themselves through their so-called public service. This year, for example, Walker took a quarter billion dollars from Wisconsin higher education, gave it instead to a project by billionaire sports team owners to construct a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, and now one of those rich guys, Jon Hammes, co-chairs Walker’s national campaign fund raising.

It’s a brilliant scam. The Donald, master of bankruptcies with four under his belt, really should be impressed. Walker is forcing the great majority of Wisconsin workers to pay taxes, not for projects they prize like schools or highways, but instead to further enrich millionaires who, in turn, fill Walker’s campaign pockets!

The Donald elevates capitalist endeavors, even those achieved through bankruptcy, over public service, suggesting non-millionaires are unqualified for office: “A number of my competitors for the Republican nomination have no business running for president. . . . Many are failed politicians or people who would be unable to succeed in the private sector.”

This echoes the derisive comments the previous Republican nominee for President, the quarter billionaire Mitt Romney, made about American people generally. He slammed nearly half of them, 47 percent, as slackers who receive government aid after they failed to be born to a famous rich man, as Romney was, and then leverage that silver spoon to make millions for themselves. Never mind that many of the 47 percent receive Social Security that they earned through a lifetime of hard work. Never mind that guys like Jon Hammes fatten their already bulging wallets with government handouts.

A specific “failed politician” that The Donald blasted was U.S. Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican, who suffers to this day from injuries he endured as a prisoner of war, didn’t defeat Barack Obama for the presidency. So The Donald called McCain a loser, a person who The Donald would fire, in fact, according to The Donald, not even a war hero.

My union, the United Steelworkers, supported Barack Obama for President and agrees with John McCain on virtually no policy issue. Ever. It is, however, without question that McCain responded honorably to the call of duty for his country and sacrificed incalculably for that.

Despite McCain’s achievements as a soldier and a senator, The Donald felt entitled to belittle him as “incapable of doing anything” because he didn’t make millions by demanding rent money from impoverished tenants, as The Donald launched his career doing, or saddling unqualified couples with subprime mortgages by falsifying their application documents or gambling as a Wall Street banker and helping crash the economy.

Money is everything for politicians like Trump and Romney and GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, who laid off 30,000 workers when she ran Hewlett-Packard then stuffed a $40 million golden parachute in her purse before leaving the ailing firm. For them, individual schemes to accrue cash are paramount. And the amount of dough collected is the true measure of a man. Or woman.

It may come as a surprise, then, to these self-aggrandizing capitalists that most Americans don’t believe human greatness is the sum of private jets and mega yachts bought with profits made on the backs of furloughed workers. And particularly relevant to politicians who evangelize careless Randian capitalism in the Bible belt is a recent poll that found the values of the faithful to be the antithesis of money worship.

Lake Research Partners released a survey last week of likely 2016 voters who are religious or faith affiliated. It found that devout voters reject the Republican concept that individuals build businesses by themselves and that every citizen must struggle alone in society competing for survival against neighbors and work mates. They rebuffed a culture based on the Donald Trump reality show The Apprentice – where contestants stomp each other to get ahead.

Instead, these religious voters believe in community where members sustain and strengthen each other. They expressed strong support for policies that inure to the collective good including paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and investment in children even if that means raising taxes.

This, frankly, is not a surprising finding in a religious country that is a closely bound collection of states. Citizens of the United States have found that they can achieve far more through affiliation and cooperation. No individual state, not even the big ones like Texas or California or New York, could have won World War II. But 50 states together, with young people volunteering for military service and women stepping up to work in factories and old people buying war bonds, generated the synergistic power of community essential for victory.

Republicans who denigrate those values do so at their own peril. Americans aren’t selfish. They don’t live by The Apprentice theme song, “For the Love of Money.” Americans are better than that. And they deserve better than mean-spirited, self-serving politicians.

Money is everything for people like Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina.

Donald Trump says exactly what the GOP believes. It’s a simple axiom: personal wealth accumulation is everything. Republican Party officials believe individuals like The Donald attain riches through their own guts, glory and gumption with not an iota of aid from community, country or, frankly, inherited wealth.

It’s just that when The Donald expresses their credo, he ignores the shinola and emphasizes the crass. Instead of going with the slick 2012 GOP convention theme, “I built that,” to aggrandize individual capitalist conquest, The Donald slammed a group of his primary competitors for serving their nation instead of themselves.

What The Donald failed to acknowledge is that some of them, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, serve themselves through their so-called public service. This year, for example, Walker took a quarter billion dollars from Wisconsin higher education, gave it instead to a project by billionaire sports team owners to construct a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, and now one of those rich guys, Jon Hammes, co-chairs Walker’s national campaign fund raising.

It’s a brilliant scam. The Donald, master of bankruptcies with four under his belt, really should be impressed. Walker is forcing the great majority of Wisconsin workers to pay taxes, not for projects they prize like schools or highways, but instead to further enrich millionaires who, in turn, fill Walker’s campaign pockets!

The Donald elevates capitalist endeavors, even those achieved through bankruptcy, over public service, suggesting non-millionaires are unqualified for office: “A number of my competitors for the Republican nomination have no business running for president. . . . Many are failed politicians or people who would be unable to succeed in the private sector.”

This echoes the derisive comments the previous Republican nominee for President, the quarter billionaire Mitt Romney, made about American people generally. He slammed nearly half of them, 47 percent, as slackers who receive government aid after they failed to be born to a famous rich man, as Romney was, and then leverage that silver spoon to make millions for themselves. Never mind that many of the 47 percent receive Social Security that they earned through a lifetime of hard work. Never mind that guys like Jon Hammes fatten their already bulging wallets with government handouts.

A specific “failed politician” that The Donald blasted was U.S. Sen. John McCain. The Arizona Republican, who suffers to this day from injuries he endured as a prisoner of war, didn’t defeat Barack Obama for the presidency. So The Donald called McCain a loser, a person who The Donald would fire, in fact, according to The Donald, not even a war hero.

My union, the United Steelworkers, supported Barack Obama for President and agrees with John McCain on virtually no policy issue. Ever. It is, however, without question that McCain responded honorably to the call of duty for his country and sacrificed incalculably for that.

Despite McCain’s achievements as a soldier and a senator, The Donald felt entitled to belittle him as “incapable of doing anything” because he didn’t make millions by demanding rent money from impoverished tenants, as The Donald launched his career doing, or saddling unqualified couples with subprime mortgages by falsifying their application documents or gambling as a Wall Street banker and helping crash the economy.

Money is everything for politicians like Trump and Romney and GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, who laid off 30,000 workers when she ran Hewlett-Packard then stuffed a $40 million golden parachute in her purse before leaving the ailing firm. For them, individual schemes to accrue cash are paramount. And the amount of dough collected is the true measure of a man. Or woman.

It may come as a surprise, then, to these self-aggrandizing capitalists that most Americans don’t believe human greatness is the sum of private jets and mega yachts bought with profits made on the backs of furloughed workers. And particularly relevant to politicians who evangelize careless Randian capitalism in the Bible belt is a recent poll that found the values of the faithful to be the antithesis of money worship.

Lake Research Partners released a survey last week of likely 2016 voters who are religious or faith affiliated. It found that devout voters reject the Republican concept that individuals build businesses by themselves and that every citizen must struggle alone in society competing for survival against neighbors and work mates. They rebuffed a culture based on the Donald Trump reality show The Apprentice – where contestants stomp each other to get ahead.

Instead, these religious voters believe in community where members sustain and strengthen each other. They expressed strong support for policies that inure to the collective good including paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and investment in children even if that means raising taxes.

This, frankly, is not a surprising finding in a religious country that is a closely bound collection of states. Citizens of the United States have found that they can achieve far more through affiliation and cooperation. No individual state, not even the big ones like Texas or California or New York, could have won World War II. But 50 states together, with young people volunteering for military service and women stepping up to work in factories and old people buying war bonds, generated the synergistic power of community essential for victory.

Republicans who denigrate those values do so at their own peril. Americans aren’t selfish. They don’t live by The Apprentice theme song, “For the Love of Money.” Americans are better than that. And they deserve better than mean-spirited, self-serving politicians.